Page Title Displaying differently on Google
-
Hi i am wondering why page title is display differently on google search. The combination of words that are being displayed on google are not on the page and the page title is simply "Camera Filters", however the page is showing as "our range of Camera Filters" (with the same capitalisation).
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0cf4r09y27
I have optimised the age as best i can so it removes the OUR RANGE OF preface, however no luck.
Any info would be appreciated.
Cheers
-
I've actually run into 1) a lot. When you search for site: you get the raw index data, not what Google will show in live SERPs. This is a problem for rich snippet text as well; when Google can read your rich snippets but chooses not to show your mark ups, the mark ups will show up in site: but not in any other searches.
I was able to find the "our range" version when I was searching just now, so this is still a problem, I'm afraid. I've given you my opinion in more detail below.
-
Hi Andrew,
Wow, this is an interesting find! Not something I've heard of before.
Like others have said, Google has recently started to take it upon themselves to rewrite your page title if they feel it's not descriptive enough. Linda shared a link that went over their official guidelines above.
Mmy theory is that "Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear" isn't descriptive enough to Google (possibly because your brand name looks like a product category, which it may not like in the page title), so it's searching your site for more information about camera filters. I wasn't able to do a full crawl of your site, but I was able to find a few links to the Camera Filters page in Google's index:
- 8% OFF ALL Camera Filters during the 8th Month (which is now redirecting home, but Google still has it in its index): "Click here for our range of Camera Filters."
- Camera Filters - Which one... (which Google also has indexed separately in the blog pagination 2 - Digital Camera Gear "To view our range of filters, please click HERE."
My theory is that Google has an algorithm that identifies low quality page titles and tries to replace them cleverly, but it doesn't have enough information to do that well in your case. To test this out, try writing a more robust <title>like:</p> <p><strong>Camera Filters - UV, Polarisers & More - Digital Camera Gear</strong></p> <p>My guess is, Google will like this better and stick with your page title.</p> <p>Let us know how this goes!</p> <p>Kristina</p></title>
-
Thanks Mark. Turns out it was "user error" All appears fine in an anonymous search.
Thanks for bring up point 2. Is this really a issue as i would have assumed in google webmaster, google would have been "notified" about this. I have done a quick search on this though and cant seem to find to much info. Any idea on how to implement on a Joomla site?
Cheers
Andrew
-
Two things:
-
if you search for "site:digitalcameragear.com.au", you'll see the title as you entered it for the camera filters page. Not sure why it's showing up differently for your search. At first, I thought it was taking some content from the page, but the word "range" doesn't appear on the page anywhere. Very strange. As others said, perhaps in an incognito window it shows up normally.
-
Totally unrelated: the site seems to have issues with duplicate content on http://www.digitalcameragear.com.au/ and http://digitalcameragear.com.au/ (without www). There are no canonical tags, so you should either add canonical tags or redirect one version to the corresponding version across the site.
-
-
Usually when Google updates the title on its own it’s because the title is not optimized or too general against the desired query. The best idea is to redevelop your title and see if it works out for you!
Hope this helps!
-
Both Chrome and Firefox have incognito/private windows as a menu choice. A global way to do non-personalized search is to append ?pws=0 after the Google query URL. (And definitely be sure you are not logged in to your browser.)
-
Hi Linda the search was Camera Filters
I am unsure how do do an anonymous search???
-
What Google will show in the search results is partly based on what the person searched for. What was your search? (I see, based on the bolding, that it included camera and filters--were there any other terms?)
Also, what happens if you do an anonymous search? If you are logged in, you might be seeing things based on your history.
Here is a link with information from Google that might help.
-
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I am not 100% convinced about this as Camera Filters would be the most relevant page title, not "our range of Camera Filters" with "our" not being capitalised either.
-
I do remember that Matt cuts said something about using criteria to change a web page title. When your title doesn't meet that criteria, Google will change your title.
Here're most important criterias:
- Short enough.
- Relevant to the query.
- describe what in the page and the site.
So, Google finds it more relevant to change your title.
Eslam
-
Thanks for looking.
Sorry, i dont understand.... If the page title is " Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear"
Then why is google displaying "our range of Camera Filters"??
It should be displaying the title tag.
-
Hey Andrew,
I checked it for you and here's the details,
You page title is: Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear. (In [title] tag)
You top heading is: Camera Filters .(in [h1] tag)
Simply Google shows your page title, not your top heading. So, you need to change your title tag.
Wish this help,
Eslam
-
Hi, the page has never been named as google is showing it at the moment. It has always just been "Camera Filters"
-
Google download a version of your page to show it in search results with a link to your page, and they update this version with time, perhaps the title of the page is old and Google didn't update it yet.
Eslam
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 fast should a page load to get a Green light at Googles PageSpeed?
So, trying to get e big e-commerce site to work on their page loading issuses. Their question left me without an answer, so how fast should a site be, so that it will get a Green light at the Googles Page Speed test? Is there a number in seconds? Do we know that?
Technical SEO | | ziiiva1230 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Title tag not showing on google? Please Help!
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.webygeeks.comI have updated title tags of my client's website 10-15 days ago, still the title on google is coming as the company name 😞 Why so??Description is correct but title is incorrect, can you please recommend me something guys?Also, i am wondering why the google cache is showing date of september 5 and we have changed the titles around 10 - 15 days before that http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P45GOiHRaIUJ:www.webygeeks.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk Really appreciate your suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lvp11380 -
Google sees 2 home pages while I only have 1
How to solve the problem of google seeing both domain.com and domain.com/index.htm when I only have one file? Will the cannonical work? If so which? Or any other solutions for a novice? I learned from previous blogs that it needs to be done by hosting service, but Yahoo has no solution.
Technical SEO | | Kurtyj0 -
New Title and Desciptions on page is visible does that mean index postion is also
Hi, I have a question, Suppose I change some content on my web page, i.e. Title, Description, some body text. And then several days later I see this changes have been reflected within the contents displayed to me when I do a google search. I also notice that at the same time that these contents have been displayed to me that the position of my site has either dropped or increased by several positions. Is it a reasonable assumption to attribute the position change to the changes I made on the webpage or is there usually a delay in position movement upon changes visibly being displayed? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Robdob20130 -
Duplicate Page Title for Wordpress
Hello, We are using WP for our blog and keep getting Dup Page Title errors for our 12 author archives pages. The title of each page is the same, but I am wondering if this is WP issue with canonicalization working properly. The most recent four pages have a linking root domain and carry some Page Authority, but the older pages do not. Is this what Rand was talking about in his Google+ whiteboard Friday talk about blog post relevancy not lasting as long as articles? Here's what it looks like. Side question, is there a reason why the SEO Moz website doesn't have a Google+ button anywhere easy to find? Thank you, Michael
Technical SEO | | MKaloud1 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830