Why is Google replacing my meta title with the business name on home page?
-
For all queries that return the home page, Google is not showing my meta title. Instead it replaced it with the official business name which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title. You can see this is you search on "mt view estate planning attorney". The site in question is dureelaw.com and the title showing is "The Law Office of Daniel L. DuRee." View the source and you'll see my meta title. Why is Google substituting it?
-
I'm back about a month later to report that it finally appears to have worked. Google is now pulling up my metatitle for a variety of queries.
Now I want to get Google to show local landing pages in the SERPS instead of the home page so that the location shows in the title and appears to be more relevant. Always a challenge. I know the standard tactics, but specific ideas are welcome. Building a silo of local pages around estate planning is hard as the topic is not really local.
-
Nuances welcome.
-
I tend to think you're right about the title. That most likely does look like a page title to Google and then you have identical titles on all pages! I replaced it with an image. We were already in the process of putting the first lines on the local pages into h1 tags, so that's done as well. It will be hard to know which one does the trick, but as long as it works I'm happy. This is standard routine SEO that needed to be done anyway.
-
"which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title"
This is incorrect. The keywords are still in your meta title. Google isn't going to ignore them for crawling/indexing purposes based on what it chooses to display. They're still in your code, still getting crawled, still totally counting.
That said, if Google thinks your title is irrelevant, doesn't match the search query well enough, etc., it will display something it deems more appropriate given the page content and searcher's query. Take it as Google's hint that your titles may need some improvement.
I agree with seowoody that you should include your branding in your title line. I'm less crazy about John's suggested title tag. I used to work for an agency that specialized in lawyers of various stripes, and I know how the competitiveness really pushes hard into the gray there, the niche is so badly overoptimized, but it just looks spammy when the second kw just repeats 2 of 3 words from the first kw... and as you've discovered, Google may replace it anyway. I would use keywords but write it for the client, like "Estate Planning Attorney in Mt. View - Duree Law".
-
In Titles google often "creates" a Title if it brand is not included in the first place. Hence we include them.
Recommend changing your Title ie Estate Planning Attorney | Estate Attorney | Duree Law
You may need to tweak the Title a few times to see what google will actually show in the SERP. But I recommend including the name of the Law firm at the end for each trial. If you use fetch for google should come up within 24 hours. Also consider changing your H1 to Mt View Estate Planning Attorney, that covers location.
Sorry if a bit blunt, but I will leave out all the standard comments re nuances of google which you are no doubt aware.
Let us know how that goes. Pretty sure it will come up trumps - and no not talking about orange wigs...
-
Google doesn’t like duplicate content in any form, including title tags. Multiple pages on your website have the very similar title tags, so Google may elect to change one or more of them in order to provide a unique description for each one.
You could try changing the making the title tags a little more unique, or swap your logo for an image instead of text, since this is where Google is pulling the "The Law Office of Daniel L. DuRee." text from.
Alternatively, this could be Google being clever and trying to push your brand (Daniel L. DuRee), as it thinks it's more useful to the searcher than the current title tag?
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
-
Generating Dynamic Meta Titles for SEO - Advice?
Hi, I'm working with a new client that works with a lot of suppliers and they want to have their titles built in a specific way. If I generate a template (so to speak) will generating dynamic meta titles have a negative effect on their SEO and is this even possible? If so, what would be the best way to handle this? There is approximately 100 suppliers. Any feedback/advice is appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | daniel-brooks0 -
How to separate your - keywords - and | Brand name in the Title Tag
I have traditionally used hyphens (-) and vertical bars (|) to separate out keywords/brands in title tags. A client has asked if other characters will work such as tilde (~), apersat (@), forward slash (/) etc. Are there any special characters we should steer clear of?
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Google Showing H1 Title Instead of Doc Title in Search Results?
I see this often for my website: Google displays my pages' H1 title instead of the document title in its search results. Is there any particular reason for this? Do we have any kind of control on this?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
How can i change my landing page title in search engines?
Hi SEO folks, Please help! I've changed my home page title 30 days ago, but my Google search results is still showing the old one! Why is that happening? can I've a brief explanation please so i can learn. thanks a million cRnPa6d
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
Can't canonical, but need pages to show in Google News
We are a news media site in which much of our content is third-party, and already published by several other sources. Our current version of our CMS doesn't expose head tags, so I can't canonical to the original and avoid a duplicate content penalty. Is it ok for news sites NOT to use canonical, or do I have to NOINDEX until our CMS is fixed?
On-Page Optimization | | Aggie0 -
Country Name in Google SERP
I am asking similar type of question that i asked before .I want to display country name in SERP like this. Ask an SEO question |SEOmozQ&A http://seomoz.org/-United States .How to display URL with country name like above.
On-Page Optimization | | Alick3000 -
Changing of title page and description
Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing. Any secret techniques to speeding this up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Google seems upset that I took their advice. [Titles and alt tags for images.]
Hey all, I accidentally posted this as a private question and now want to post it publicly due to some updates (for the worse.) I'm a photographer and the site I'm talking about is my portfolio site. It is very image heavy and had basically no text. Those who have consistently beat me (positions 1,2, etc.) in SERPs for my key search phrases have a modest amount of text on their pages. I'd been doing OK in SERPs (top 3-5 for my key search phrases) over the past couple years and my site has decent age and domain authority (a good number of relevant inbound links from extremely reputable sources over the years, etc. etc.) [In case it matters, my root domain has a PageRank of 4 and I have a couple internal pages with PR5.] For years I resisted adding any text because I was trying to obey Google's rule to design "for people, not search engines." Over the past couple of months, though, I got some advice on the SEOMoz webinar about adding (relevant) alt text and body text, and also read Google's Webmaster Central article about giving images good titles and alt tags, so I decided to take the plunge about ten days ago. I went through the site and added modest amounts of relevant text to pages where it was appropriate and where it didn't detract (too much) from the design. I made sure my images had sensible human-readable alt tags that were descriptive and made sure not to do any keyword stuffing. Finally, I edited some of my page titles so that they were a little more descriptive. Again, nothing extreme or radical or spammy. (But overall, esp. from Google's perspective, there were some fairly significant changes in a short period of time.) Well.. you're all already guessing what's next. As soon as Google saw these changes, I tanked pretty badly. I went from position 3-5 on my key phrases to positions like 16-25 and spent a few days in those positions. Now I'm just gone & buried somewhere in Google's boneyard. My latest ranking report for today shows me "not in top 50" for any of my key phrases on Google. I'm #1 for many of those same terms/phrases on Bing and Yahoo. (Always have fared very well with them.) Google's webmaster tools says my sitemap is OK and most of the URLs submitted are in the index. Please tell me this is temporary, while Google deals with my changes? (Actually don't, just tell me what you really think.) 🙂 Thank you all...
On-Page Optimization | | vdms0