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
-
What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine. But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should. Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO? With thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | Dandelion0 -
Launch of improved site
Hi, Just want to ask you guys if i have missed something in my planning. We have done a migration from Ithemes Exchange to woocommerce. The complete migration are done on our dev server. It has an exakt setup as our live one. My plan is to change our live version with a backup from our migrated and finished site from our dev site. All of our product links will be intact with accept from some that we have combined in to new ones, the ones that are changed has been redirected with a 301. Will this way of launching our site effect our ranking/seo in some way? Thankful for any thoughts about this one! // Jonas
Technical SEO | | knubbz0 -
Some Old date showing in SERP
I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
Technical SEO | | rbai0 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
Re-using site code.
Hi, I'm looking at launching a new website, and am keen to understand whether re-using the basic code behind one of my other sites will cause me an issue. I'll be changing the directory structure/ file names, etc - but it will basically leave me with a very similar-looking site to another in my portfolio - using code thats all ready out there, etc. Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | newstd1000 -
Old massive site, should I nofollow all out going links?
The company I work for is in the process of rebuilding our entire website profile. Our biggest site, FrenchQuarter.com ranks pretty well for our main term "French Quarter Hotels" And we use that to drive business directly to our hotel businesses. The site is very old and one I inherited, rebuilding it won't be a priority for another 9 months or so. This site act's as a bit of a directory for the city. There are links everywhere and it's probably passing link juice to a lot of businesses scott free. In the mean time would it benefit or hurt us if I went through and no-followed most of the links? Would nofollowing links help frenchquarter.com to rank any better than it does? And could I then direct some of that link juice directly at our hotel websites to boost those as well? My goal is to get our hotel websites to rank 1st page, we get exposure in the locations pack, for 2 of our 5 hotels, but placing below that is impossible with all the competition from the OTA's (expecia, bookit.com, etc) Seems near impossible no matter what my backlink profile looks like. Thanks for any feedback, Cyril
Technical SEO | | Nola5041 -
Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none). In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research... And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found. His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse" We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat. We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened. Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on... Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
Technical SEO | | Greg_Gifford0 -
How to do a no follow on site search
We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?
Technical SEO | | Apptixweb0