Google truncating or altering meta title - affect rankings?
-
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure)
Anyway, the rankings for the home page have dropped quite a bit. I'm wondering if the change that Google makes affects rankings (i.e. name of site doesn't have all the keywords).
-
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure)
Now if you believe that it is the ODP that is causing the trouble, you can add this Meta tag in the section of the pages -
However, if this has not been the case, it could be that the links that have been built are not in line with the existing title. And sometimes, Google changes the title itself if it feels that the title is not well optimized –
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/01/better-page-titles-in-search-results.html
-
While I don't think anyone can say for sure if one specific thing like this could result in lower ranking, IMHO a truncated title is not generally going to be the culprit of rankings drop. However, I do think a truncated title can significantly lower click-thru rate on your organic listings, which could be a factor in rankings (i.e. higher click-thru rate could equal higher rankings).
I always encourage the sites that I SEO to adhere to Google's character limitations and make the most out of the organic real estate Google gives you. It's your chance to get someone to come to your site. If the title/and or description is truncated, it has less chance of being compelling, or containing the information that makes someone want to click through and visit your pages.
Hope that's helpful!
Dana
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
-
Ranking Drop and Google Disavow Requests
My website, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has fallen dramatically for the top industry search terms (nile cruise, nile cruises) over the last 12 months from previous page one rankings to page three which has very badly affected us financially. I found, using Linkdetox, that we had thousands of back-links for non-related anchor-text, mainly porn terms, viagra, etc. I have submitted a Disavow file and request about a week ago and wondered firstly if the enormous amount of these links would have helped cause the drop to page three and secondly if the Disavow request will eventually help the website return to better rankings? Thanks,Colin
Technical SEO | | GratefulFred0 -
Google not pulling correct Meta Description
For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible. Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Changes to title and description not appearing in Google search...
www.heatwavemedia.com Search terms: san francisco video production, san francisco video production services In Google search site appears as "Heartwave Media: San Francisco Video Production Services" but I'm sure I've never used a colon in all my iterations of the title... Instead it reads "San Francisco Video Production Services | Heartwave Media" with the description "A San Francisco video production company specializing in creative corporate and commercial video services." But that's not coming up either... I'm on Wordpress and am using All in One SEO if that helps... Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | keeot0 -
Google is not respecting the meta title
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title> In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question): <hgroup> Pilar Soro
Technical SEO | | ofuente
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí. Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup> Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now The point is that google has considered that this particular is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com". Two things for which this is even more strange are the following: while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others? the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last? What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10 on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after. Provided this situation, we would like to know: is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people? why is it happening? Is it somehow related to , <hgroup>and ? why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages? more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow? Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received! AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232 </hgroup>0 -
Meta tags
Hello, Does anyone know how long it takes for the meta descriptions to show up in Google? This because I just updated my meta descriptions for the whole website, but while moz toolbar is showing it correctly, google is still showing the old ones, even if i used the see as googlebot tool from webmaster tools. Thanks for a reply
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Eugenio | Social Engagement0 -
Does Site Structure Affect Google
Hi - I'm pretty new at this. We’re running an e-commerce affiliate site at http://www.mydomain.com. So we don’t take payments but customer gets passed through to third party sites when they select to buy a product. We have a blog at http://www.mydomain.com/news. I think Google is treating these 2 sites as as separate sites for PR. For this reason we're thinking about moving this to http://news.mydomain.com. Anyone have any experience in this?
Technical SEO | | richardjoseph0 -
Google plus
" With a single Google search, you can see regular search results, along with all sorts of results that are tailored to you -- pages shared with you by your friends, Google+ posts from people you know" Would i be able to see my own post which i shared with someone in my Google plus circle, when i do a search ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0