Old site name showing in SERPs
-
Hi all,
We've recently re-launched one of our sites with a substantial redesign, refreshed content, meta data, descriptions and functionality.
We noticed in SERPs that some of the page titles are showing the old name for the site, which hasn't been used for a few years and the site's been through a few updates and a URL change since then.
All the meta titles showing up as they should in crawls through Search Console and Moz and it's my understanding that if Google were pulling a cached version of a title it would have gone for a more recently cached one?
Any thoughts on why Google's turned back the clock on our site's name would be greatly appreciated!
-Jamie
-
Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!
-
Hiya Dan,
Many thanks for your response, our site is: www.creditreport.co.uk
It seems like in the last week we've stopped experiencing this issue, but until we get to the cause of it there's always a possibility it could happen again.
Going by what you've said, I think it's most likely the 301 issue: our old site was much larger so there are a lot of pages currently getting 301'd to the homepage as there isn't a relevant alternative page to redirect users to at the moment.
Everything else you've mentioned has already checked out, I even did a backlink audit a few weeks ago because I had the same suspicion, but there weren't enough sites linking to us using the old name as the anchor text to cause an issue.
Thanks again for your help!
-Jamie
-
Hi Jamie
There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).
But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:
- Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
- Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
- Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
- Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.
ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.
But any details you could provide would be helpful!
-
Hiya James, thanks for your response-
It seems like we might be suffering similar issues if not necessarily exactly the same thing. Before our latest re-design we had a load more pages that were cut, most of them should 301 to the homepage, but some of those pages are returning a 404.
I think the main difference is that most of our page titles are showing up fine, reflecting our latest changes, but the homepage and another one about legal information have gone retro on us, which makes me think our site is at least getting crawled properly?
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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
301 domain name to another site
I had 2 websites. I decided not to maintain one of them and set it to 301 to my main website. However, i see people getting 404 errors when they land on my main website but with a page name from the old site. How can I set things so that anyone who tries to go to the old site goes to my homepage of my main site? http://siteA.com http://oldsiteB.com/oldpagename sends them to http://siteA.com//oldpagename = 404 - I want them to go directly to homepage on siteA.
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Why is my site not being indexed?
Hi, I have performed a site:www.menshealthanswers.co.uk search on Google and none of the pages are being indexed. I do not have a "noindex" value on my robot tag This is what is in place: Any ideas? Jason
Technical SEO | | Jason_Marsh1230 -
301 redirect to WWW on a 2 year old website with good SERPs and organic traffic?
Hi everyone, Recently someone pointed out that my website can be accessed in both ways i.e. by typing www.example.com or example.com. He further added that Google might identify this as duplicate content and penalize my website. So now I'm thinking about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess method. But my website is 2 year old now and I'm getting some decent traffic from Google. Will this redirection have an adverse effect on my rankings? Is there any other way to resolve this issue? I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic. Any help would be very much appreciated. P.S. Currently Google index my website pages with WWW.
Technical SEO | | nicksharma040 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Why am I not showing up in the SERP's or Google Local?
I have been trying to optimise the following site for both Google SERP's and Google Local - Pixel Primate The URL has been around for around 3 years now but they just updated the website and launched it in December 2012. I did the on-page optimisation early in January 2013 and Google seems to have indexed the changes, for the home page at least. One major keyword I am targeting for the home page is 'Web Design Leicester'. I understand that the DA is fairly low (24) so this is something I need to improve. However, I've experienced positive results fairly quickly from just on-page optimisation for other sites I have worked on. The site just doesn't seem to be ranking at all for any keywords. Maybe the industry type is just extremely competitve but I find it very strange to not be visible anywhere in the SERPs. The site does not seem to have any penalties as it ranks for 'Pixel Primate' and all pages appear when doing a site: search. Also what's strange is that I set up the Google Local listing years ago but it doesn't appear anywhere in the local listing, not even when I search for it manually. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
Have my SERP listings been hacked?
When you Google my site the organic search results look normal. The preview site images even display my actual site when you roll over the results. However, when you click a result you are directed to various Spam pages, not my website. How is this possible? This only happens when you click through from search engines. If you type the URL directly in your browser, you are not redirected to a spam site. the site: funeralhomeoptions.com Have any of you seen or experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | emmyjo0 -
Why do some serps have a + map symbol?
Hi from sunny but freezing wetherby UK.. Ive noticed when you enter "York solicitors" some listings have + Show map symbol. Hers is a screen shot to illustrate: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/plus-map-serps-langleyscopy.jpg I'd like to know please what i would have to do to emulate this. Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1