Can Title Tag be seen in the page source, but not seen by search engines?
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This is a follow up question derived from a previous question I posted - http://moz.com/community/q/does-title-tag-location-in-a-page-s-source-code-matter
There have been several reputable crawl tools used on our (including Moz) site that state we are missing title tags on may pages. One such page is http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
I can see the title tag on line 238 of the page source. I find it unlikely that there is an issue with the crawl tools.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Nick
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Hi Nick, you've received several great responses. Did any of them help you resolve your issue?
Christy
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My thoughts are there is so much going on before the title tag that you give the bots to much of a chance to fail reading the site before they get to it.
Put it above the keywords meta tag, and if I were you I would remove, Google has been rumoured to use this tag as a negative sign for keywords your trying to rank for but don't have content for on that page.
Is there any reason you do not have all that javascript in a js file? making the user download it with every page load is a real waste and multiple things like that are really slowing your site down. Your site is slipping into a possible page speed algorithm issue and also will deter the impatient.
So my thought is that if anything is rendered incorrectly before the title tag (and there is a lot of code for that to happen) then it may not find the title tag as a result.
Also try this tool and consider some of its recommendation.
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- I am so sorry it took me so long to get this to you
- PDF breakdown of 8000 pages
- http://cl.ly/Xnuq
- crawl you can click everything
- http://crawl.blueprintmarketing.com/projects/reports/69927?ro=48978c19517a426cf9109aa96ec59ab074faf0f8
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Thanks gain Tom for all of your help. Greatly appreciated.
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Thank you very much for your response Spencer
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Hi Nick,
I ran the site through screaming frog Pro last night as well however I do not go to the steps of actually saving the HTML file and uploading it.
I'm currently running your site through DeepCrawl.co.uk similar to screaming frog however it is made for very largewebsites.
I have told it to "ignore javascript"
Like Spencer suggested I think what he said makes a lot of senses.
I should tell you that I guessed your site was under 10,000 URI's.
The XML sitemap was over 10K
Unfortunately, I limited the crawl to 10K ( the cost is very high as well) so I will deliver your 10,000 page crawl When it is finished.
Tom
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So I copied your source code into an html file on a locally hosted server and ran it through screaming frog. It read it with no issues.
Since your script and css files are using relative references it crawled them as 404's but it read the title, description and everything else without issues. This leads me to believe that one of your javascript files is causing an issue with the crawler.
If you have the pro version of screaming frog you can adjust the settings to ignore javascript and see if that works, which may help you solve the problem.
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Title tags are generally placed in the head section of a website which yours is in the head tag but comes below your navigation it looks like. You could try moving it above your keywords tag. The keywords are not widely used anymore btw. Good luck!
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