301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
-
Hi,
This is a new one to me ?!
I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages.
Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on?
The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s?
I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet)
Any help would be appreciated.
Kind Regards
Tony
-
Yes my friend. It happens with Google as they are trying hard and working towards their ultimate goal that is as follows:
"We would like to give the user what he wants and not what he types in the search bar"
So all that one can do is to just stick to the best practices, put in diligent and sincere efforts to make our websites provide a good if not the best user experience. I would also like to suggest you that if you can make the title, description and the content go hand-in-hand tightly, then you will not have to worry about Google picking up a title on its own. Yet, no one can guarantee even if you do so will make Google will pick-up the meta information that you mentioned.
-
Hi Devanur,
This was indeed the problem. Trying different keywords resulted in different title texts.
Nothing to do with the 301s after all.
Thanks for your help.
Tony
-
Don't worry my friend. Its been just 3 days. Wait for sometime and check for the issue. You should be doing good. There is one more thing in here. Google does not always show the same title in the SERPs that you specified on your website. It can pick anything that it feels relevant for the page. The possible places to pick would be, content of the page, your site's DMOZ listing and also the title can differ depending on the search term.
For more about this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webmasters/uuLNmyB0AlY
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Devanur,
I did the redirects Friday, so it seems odd that it has made a difference so soon. On looking at it further I found that all pages that had a redirect added last Friday have the wrong title in googles serp whilst the pages that didn't get redirected to remain unchanged??
I am confident all the page titles were correct before I did the redirect.
The titles that have been attributed to my current pages are from old pages that were removed in October??
I'm wondering if google got mixed up when crawling my site.
-
Hi Tony,
How long has it been since you did a 301. Normally, it would take 3 to 5 weeks for the new changes to reflect in the SERPS.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect
We have a small number of content pages where the urls paths were setup before we started looking really hard at SEO. The paths are longer than recommended (but not super crazy IMHO) and some of the pages get a decent amount of traffic. Moz suggests updating the URLs to make them shorter but I wonder if anyone has experience with the tradeoffs here. Is it better to mark those issues to be ignored and just use good URLs going forward or would you suggest updating the URLs to something shorter and implementing a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | russell_ms0 -
How to change URL structure in google webmasters
Is there any way to ask google to indexed the website in following URL structure abc.com/category/postname (I have this structure on my website) But Currently google indexed my website posts as - abc.com/postname/category How I can tell google to follow the right structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Is it alright to repeat a keyword in the title tag?
I know at first glance, the answer to this is a resounding NO, that it can be construed as keyword stuffing,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MIGandCo
but please hear me out. I am working on optimizing a client's website and although MOST of the title tags
can be optimized without repeating a keyword, occasionally I run into one where it doesn't read right if I
don't repeat the keyword. Here's an example: Current title:
Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company Name What I am considering using as the optimized title:
Adobe Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company Name Yes, I know both titles are longer than recommended. In both instances, only the company name gets
truncated so I am not too worried about that. So I guess what I want to know is this: Am I right in my original assumption that it is NEVER okay to
repeat keywords in a title tag or is it alright when it makes sense to do so?0 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
What time to expect until onpage change is reflected in google ranking?
Most pages on our site are crawled by google about once per week. We plan to implement a new navigation structure with much more interlinks among our pages. I would like to test it first just for a few pages to measure impact. How long may it take approximately until an onpage change related to link structure is reflected in google rankings? Any experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
My Google title isn't showing what is entered
Help! On Yahoo and Bing, if you search "Chant Real Estate" the full title that I've entered appears in the search listings: Chant PA Real Estate | Real Estate PA | Pennsylvania: Find PA Homes for Sale But in Google it only shows "Chant PA Real Estate". This title was what the original developer used for their site and it's been almost a year now that it's been under our control. Any suggestions? The URL is www.chantre.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXe0 -
Are there any negatives to channeling my links through a 301 redirect?
I'm channeling 1000's of links through another url with a 301 redirect. I've thought this through and can't see any downside to doing this, but I want to get your opinion. Can you see any downside to doing this? With regards to passing anchor text, PR, PA, etc? Since this is done with sites all the time when they change urls, I can't see Google being able to penalize me for this....can you? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian-M0 -
Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing? My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes7