Is Google indexing something I can't see on my page title?
-
When I do a search for my businesses website (colourpages.com) it returns a listing which is great but the title tag includes Hull Colour Pages which is our old brand name - we changed to colourpages.com 2 years ago yet Hull Colour Pages is still pulling through on the title tag.
I have checked the source and it's as follows:
<title>Plumbers in Hull - Reviews - colourpages.com</title>
I have attached a photo which shows the issue - http://imgur.com/Cva3001
Is Google indexing it from old history that is no longer visible or am I missing something?
-
Hey
Google will rewrite page titles when they believe the rewritten title provides a better or more accurate description of your site. This may be due to what they see as poor page titles or that the revision makes the title closer to users search query so they would be more likely to click through.
Some stated reasons for doing this are:
- Titles are particularly short
- Titles are shared across large parts of your site
- Titles appear to be mostly a collection of keywords
Here is a quote from Google on why they do this:
"If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."
In your case they are showing the whole page title but adding the brand onto the end as they are not seeing the "colourpages.com" bit as being the brand.
Now, there is no way to directly control this but I can think of a few things to look at straight away.
1. Google use lots of brand signals and ideally all listings of your business should be consistent but, they are not. In fact, there are lots of mentions of your old brand. So, if we search for the old brand, your postcode and remove listings from our own site we find lots and lots of listings:
"hull colour pages" -www.colourpages.com "HU1 3RE"
"hull colour pages" -www.colourpages.com
I would claim and tidy these for starters.
2. I would make a small change to your page title as well and change the brand to "Colour Pages" and use a different seperator to show this is not just a "collection of keywords". Something like:
Plumbers in Hull - Reviews | Colour Pages
Here we have a clearly branded page title that is easier to understand and it includes part of the "Hull Colour Pages" so they may be happier with it. We also clearly differentiate between the keywords and branding with a different separator.
3. External Links
Other folks have mentioned external links so certainly run your backlink profile through OSE and see if you can locate sites linking back and get that updated.
To sum up here Google is not seeing your "colourpages.com" as being the brand so first up make the change to the URL to use "Colour Pages" and separate this from the main part of the page title with the horizontal separator and then do an audit of all old brand mentions and get them claimed and updated so all brand signals are consistent.
To put this into perspective, even your Facebook page uses the old brand so you just need to identify all of these old references and start cleaning them up:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hull-Colour-Pages/104140679621054No promises here as Google is a fickle mistress at best but these tips would certainly be where I would start with the title changes done first as that is a quick tweak and then work on the brand mentions and get them all updated so you are consistent on and off site.
Hope that helps!
MarcusReferences:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624 http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html -
There is a wikipedia article using the old name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_Colour_Pages
I bet that editing that would go a long way to fixing your problem...
-
Thank you LindaLV - pleased to hear someone else has had this happen to them.
I will check all external links and see what the descriptions are - see if this helps change what appears on Google.
Thanks for your help
-
Hi Tuzzell
It's happening to a lot of our URL's but this is the one that i copied the code from http://www.colourpages.com/s/plumbers The terms colourpages.com or Hull are ok because we are a local telephone directory site. It's just the term 'Hull Colour Pages' written exactly like this that we was wanting to change as that was our old name until we changed to colourpages.com.
I just can't seem to find it in the code yet it appears the Google results.
Thanks for your quick response on this one
-
This has happened to me as well, having an old name show up in the search results. Google does not always use what you put in the title tag for the page title if it thinks that something else is more relevant.
In my case, there were still a good number of external links to the site with the old name being the anchor text, which is where Google got it, I assume. I see on your site that variations on "Colour Pages" are used in a number of your links; maybe that's where Google is picking it up.
-
Which particular URL are you looking at?
I have just crawled the site and the Meta titles being reported are the same i see in the HTMl (that i looked at, the crawl is 6.5k pages allready and only half way through). When i searched for your URL in Google got the home page back as you would expect and see Hull mentioned in the title, but it was in you meta title too.
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 recently updated a large guide that takes the place of the original. The original has some nice organic traffic to it and I don't want to risk losing it. Should I 301 redirect to the new version, or update all the info directly on the original page?
We don't have a lot of content that garners much non-branded organic, so this is something I don't want to risk losing. We do not have a whole lot of external links into the page either.
On-Page Optimization | | AFP_Digital1 -
With the release of so many domains from .expert through to even .xyz why don't we see many around the top of SERPS?
And should I use one of these to create a nice looking site, invest time, energy, resource, money or will I simply regret it later and stick to the main TLDs? First question on Moz (yey)
On-Page Optimization | | LGG1230 -
Inches or " Feet or ' Does Google translate the symbols?
I have a client who sells things that the size is important. In their industry some people say "15 Inch Blue Widget" and others say "15" Blue Widget" using the symbol " for inches. On the page I know we could say both to cover all the bases but I want to get the title right. In their industry there is not one more preferred than the other. Does anybody know if Google translates ' to feet and " to inches. Should I work both into the title for a product or only one?
On-Page Optimization | | JoshuaLindley0 -
Google Results Title Tag HELP
Can anybody tell us why Google changes your title tag in the SERP? If you check out the below link or type in 'days inn', you will see the 2nd result for www.daysinnrc.co.uk just says 'Days Inn' but on the actual site the title tag for this page is 'Days Inn UK | Days Inn | Daysinnrc.co.uk' http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=days+inn&oq=days+inn&gs_l=hp.3...4110.4110.4.4297.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.kWVC24EnCHE&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=7680231318a44bb0&bpcl=35466521&biw=1920&bih=934 This has happened with another site too, does anybody know why? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SEOwins0 -
Should I worry about duplicate titles on pages where there is paginated content?
LivingThere.com is a real estate search site and many of our content pages are "search result" - ish in that a page often provides all the listings that are available and this may go on for multiple pages. For example, this is a primary page about a building: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange Because of the number of listings, the listings paginate to a second page: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange?MListings_page=2 Both pages have the same Page Title. Is this a concern? If so is there a "best practice" for giving paginated content different titles? Thanks! Nate
On-Page Optimization | | nate1230 -
DUPLICATE PAGE TITLE ISSUE
Hi We have 25 pages with a download form on it. People arrive at the page through a ink with optimised anchor text which sits on the information pages. As there is no information on these pages we do not need them to be optimised so the developer has given all the download pages exactly the same page title. Although the pages in themselves are not significant would this effect the way Google viewed the whole site, and would it pay to make each one unique or doesn't it really matter. Alternatively, is there a better way to handle this? and if so would that ligate the benefit of the anchor text. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920 -
Page title in SERP question
Has anyone typed in a phrase in Google and seen their listing on the SERP, but the page title on the Google SERP is not what the CMS is set to ? Ie the page title in the SERP is not what is expected? Something related to the company, but not what is set on the CMS… Very odd – has anyone seen something like this before? What could be causing it? Is there a way to change it?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Page title = h1, or slight variation of it?
I recently found a new SEO tool http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/ It is fast, and has found some site tweaks I need to make. There is a free demo version that crawls up to 500 URIs. I recommend you check it out (I'm not affiliated). One of the conditions it checks for is if your page <title>is exactly equal to your <h1> tag. The fact that they flag it makes me wonder if that's something I should avoid (?).</p> <p>When I googled it I found a variety of opinions. When I looked at Rand's excellent piece on the perfectly optimized page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization I notice that the example Page Title and H1 are slightly different. By design, or a happy coincidence?</p> <p>Any opinions on whether I should make my Page Titles slightly different than my H1 tags to avoid the appearance of over optimization, or some other penalty?</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0