Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
-
Hi ,
One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is"PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif )
Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason)I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif)Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"?Thanks in advance,
Kadel -
Hi Christy ,Sorry for the delay.
I can't be 100% sure (after all it's Google) but here's what I did.
On the homepage I've changed the title into this format:
brand name + "|" + slogan with keyword
while on the rest of the pages I have not changed the title and left it in the following format: Page's Title + "|" + Brand name After that , this website's title results appeared as above , without ":" or re-position of the brand in the title.Hope it will help.
-
Hi Kadel, what is the current status of this issue? Any updates to report? Cheers, Christy
-
I experience different results: when the brand name is in front on the title like "Brand - Tag Line" and you search for "tag line" google modifies the title to "Tag Line: Brand" which is quite annoying for me.
I tested for a couple of month "Brand - Tag Line 1 | Tag Line 2" and searching for "tag line" didn't produced any title change, yet I hate the way the pipe looks on the title, so we decided to move back to "Brand - Tag Line" and well, stand whatever google decides to modify.
-
In Adwords the | (pipe) is not allowed in ads anymore. Maybe this is the case for organic too. You can use a - (dash) though and you should be good to go.
-
I believe I've found the answer so I'm posting it here for anyone else who would like to know:
There don’t appear to be any examples of colon insertion if the brand name is already at the front of the page title. This is interesting since when Google decides to tweak the titles as above, it removes the dash or the pipe and replaces these with a colon. However if the brand name is already at the front, Google is happy to leave the dash or the pipe in.
From: http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand
I am about to change the brand name to Hebrew so it will be in front of the page title so I'll be able to confirm it.
Will update you with the results.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0