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
-
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Authorship and Aggregate Rating in SERPS
I've setup authorship and aggregate rating information for our website. It all checks in the Structured Data Testing Tool, but the results in the SERPs have been on then off. At first my authorship image showed on all articles were the markup existed, then suddenly it went away. Then more recently, the aggregate rating information displayed on all pages were the markup existed, then again, it suddenly disappeared. I'm curious if anyone knows if the disappearance of these things are the result of manual action from Google or simply because the algorithm gathering more information that would cause the items to stop showing for one reason or another? In both cases the markup didn't change previous to the results disappearing. This leads me to believe the change in the SERPs wasn't a result of the markup, but rather something on Google's side.
Technical SEO | | Tim.Paulino0 -
Site Indexed but not Cached?
I launched a new website ~2 weeks ago that seems to be indexed but not cached. According to Google Webmaster most of the pages are indexed and I see them appear when I search site:www.xxx.com. However, when I type into the URL - cache:www.xxx.com I get a 404 error page from Google.
Technical SEO | | theLotter
I've checked more established websites and they are cached so I know I am checking correctly here... Why would my site be indexed but not in the cache?0 -
Why my site is not indexing in google
In google webmaster i have updated my sitemap in Mar 6th..There is around 22000 links..But google fetched only 5300 links for long time...
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Chandran
I waited for 1 month till no improvement in google index..So apr6th we have uploaded new sitemap (1200 links totally)..,But only 4 links indexed in google ..
why google not indexing my urls? Is this affect our ranking in SERP? How many links are advisable to submit in sitemap for a website?0 -
File name same as folder name, ok?
Is it ok to have a folder and file name to be both the same e.g domain.com/xyz-products/ domain.com/xyz-products.php File name would be a page that lists a number of products and then within the folder there would be x-product.php, y-product.php etc
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Should I show archives on site?
Should I show my archives on my site? I have WordPress and have dragged the archive widget to the bottom. Would this be considered duplicate content?This is what it looks like. October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 February 2012
Technical SEO | | MyAllenMedia0 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Can leaving up old web pages no longer accessible through my site navigation hurt my rankings?
My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?
Technical SEO | | matt-145670