We changed the title and meta description of our home page a few weeks ago. Then we performed the Crawl > Fetch as Google in webmaster tools as outlined (Refresh Google Search Results for My Site). Within an hour the description of our page in Google search changed, but the title stayed the same. A few weeks later it’s still the same as the old title. Can anyone explain this behavior and what can I do so Google will display the new title?
Our domain is 4 years old. DA=29, PA-40
Thanks
Google is not suppose to display the exact title you put in your title tag IF he think this one is not corresponding/relevant enough with the real content of your page.Are you sure your title tag is relevant to your topic and not too spammy or duplicated with another one??? Try to change a little in your content, then again your title then internal link anchors and external link anchir with this new title.
For anyone wondering, I found the answer. The difference between my old title and my new title was simply rearranging some words. I made a third title that had more changes and that title was updated in less than an hour. It looks like Google keeps an order independent hash of words in the title, and if only the order changed, Google thinks it's the same title as before and doesn't update it.
Related
I have set up my google+ account with everything linked to my website, my website linking to Google+ as per instructions, but photo is not showing in search results, even though the google testing says all is fine.
My site is www.mikegeorgiades.com (Google+ link code in homepage).
My Google+ page is https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/105269586899946171489/+Mikegeorgiades-guitarist-for-hire
Is there any reason why the test would appear OK but not for real? Is there a lag? Thanks!
that can have multiple reasons:
On their help pages the Google guys wrote that "Your Google+ profile picture should be a good, recognisable head-shot". When you browse the web via Google’s search engine you probably see a lot of images which do not show “good, recognisable head-shots”. I think it belongs to Google whether the picture shows up or not.
Google Authorship does not work when you link to a Google+ business page instead of a real profile page.
You did not add a link back from your site to your Google+ page (see this help page (Option 2)).
Your author info is hidden to the public. Google don't like hidden stuff. Make sure that your reciprocal backlink is not hidden via CSS.
Very obvious: Your Google+ profile has no profile picture.
Your site is cached and the backlink is not yet integrated into the source code. Try to clear your cache.
Your backlink is missing the rel="author" attribute.
Your backlink is missing the ?rel=author attribute in the URL (ex. href="http://plus.google.com/u/0/123456789/?rel=author")
Check that your E-Mail Address (if added to your Google+ profile) is on the same domain as your content (read more about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986)
Make sure that the byline of your content includes the same name as in your Google+ profile. For example: When your Google+ Profile is "John Doe" your byline has to be "By John Doe" and not "By Doe John" or anything else.
You have not submitted your E-Mail address via this page: http://plus.google.com/authorship
Your Google+ profile is not visible to the public.
Your Google+ profile has been excluded to the search (so no one can find you via Google`s search engine).
There are multiple authors on one page. Google always uses only the first author that has been mentioned on a page.
You did not add your website to "Contributor To" section (click here to do that now: http://plus.google.com/me/about/edit/co)
The "Contributor To" section is not visible to the public.
The Rich Snippet Testing Tool throws errors (even if they are not related to authorship)
Last but not least: Google just does not want to display your profile picture
Update 1: More reasons can be:
Some users said that it also won't work when your website was not confirmed as yours in Google Webmaster Tools.
Some said that they got it to work after adding the same URL in Google+ as in Google Webmaster tools (Within Google webmaster tools you can setup the preferred domain (www or non-www).)
I'm not working at Google but I think when the Rich Snippet Testing Tool shows your picture it should appear in search results after some days.
Update 2: One more:
You have deactivated the option that noone can find your picture in Googles search results. To solve this go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and scroll down to the "Profile" section. Activate the checkbox beside "Help others discover my profile in search results." (in German this is: "Andere sollen mein Profil in Suchergebnissen finden können").
Update 3: One more:
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst # Google) announced that in the near future Google will not longer show the profile picture in search results. Instead it will show up on Google News only. However the name will still show up on search results pages. Preview image can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986
I recently experienced my photo disappearing from the search results and I, too, verified that everything else was correct under the structured data testing tool. At first my photo snippet was showing in the SERP but then it vanished. I was also trying different profile photos. I had one with dimensions of 400x400 pixels and another one with dimensions of 256x256 pixels. I didn't fully verify it, but Google apparently didn't like my 400x400 photo. Google wants a clear profile photo of your face. Perhaps some algorithm found my larger photo too grainy or something along those lines. Changing my photo back to the 256x256 version caused my photo to reappear in the search results! I'd suggest trying different dimensions, different photo formats, perhaps even changing the color profile. The search results were updated fairly quickly after I uploaded a working photo. Seems like I saw results in under an hour, YMMV.
You can refer to the photo I used, along with my Contributor to links, at my Google+ page at https://plus.google.com/108810746834291116055. The page that I have my authorship set at is http://blog.ikiapps.com using rel=author.
Update on 2014-Apr-27:
I can confirm my advice worked for me again after completely changing my Google profile to another account and losing the visibility of my authorship associated photo in search results for a brief period of time. It is now restored after following what I posted here.
"Mogral ಅಥವಾ മൊഗ്രാല്" was my website's (http://mogral.in) old title.
Since the title contains the words from another language, I felt it will badly affect the position in the search result.
So I changed to new title; contains only english words.
See this query; it shows old title:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mogral+ಅಥವಾ+മൊഗ്രാല്
See this query it shows new title:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mogral+football+mappilapattu
Why it shows same url with two title?
One more problem is that google add the old titles to pages with malayalam-language titles
See https://www.google.com/search?q=site:mogral.in
I submitted the sitemap for all mogral.in/news/* only after changing the old title.
Why it is happening? how to solve it?
First question would be how long ago did you make the change? It takes time for any changes to be reflected in SERPs. Also, I don't see your site when I use your query examples - I see this post. So, the changes may be getting updated now.
Finally,a sites title and meta tags are suggestions for google, not the rule. Google tries to improve CTR (click through rate) so many times for particular search terms, a modified version of your title and meta description will be displayed in the search results.
I just found out that Google recently decided to start using their own "title" when they display their search results. Also, after checking Yahoo and Bing I saw that the way they are displaying their results are the same but in completely different way than Google.
I guess my question would be, if there is an actual "correct" way of adding titles to my pages in order for Google to display what I want them to and this way get the same results with Yahoo/Bing that are currently using the page's title as a search result (sometimes they pick up the first tag and use it as title).
Any recommendations or links to follow for more studying would be appreciated.
There's nothing you can really do about it. Google will choose what title to display based on criteria they have not made public. This usually is the page's title as found in the <title> tag but if Google feels a different title better summarizes the page's content they may choose to display something else.
You can try to change your page titles to better reflect the page's content and see if that helps.
Using optimal keyword prominency in meta tags according to guidelines... and Google will pick up your meta tags. See our news portal's source and metas (keywords: hírek, választás 2014, etc.): http://valasztas2014.hir24.hu/
Has anyone got any ideas on where we should be adding our SEO metadata in a Web Forms project? Why I ask is that currently I have two main Masterpages, one is the home page and the other one is every other page, they both have the same metadata that’s just a generic description and set of key words about my site. The problem with that is search engines are only picking up my home page and my own search engine displays the same title and description for all results.
The other problem is the site is predominantly dynamic so if you type in a search for beach which is a major categories on the site you get 10000 results that all go to different information but all look like a link to the same page to the user.
edit
It's live here www.themorningtonpeninsula.com
Don't know why this post was moved here either, I put it up on stackoverflow.com. I didn't know about this site but I'm glad I do now!
It is in its essence a programming question and the answer is to use dynamic meta tags to your pages and your the master pages. If you do a search on this most of what comes up is "How to add meta tags to your masterpages" that's easy but not a good idea!
Put this in the page_load of you page then populate the hard coded bits from the database.
Page.Header.Title = "Some new dynamically created page Title!";
Page.Header.Description = "Some dynamically created description";
Page.Header.Keywords = "stuff, more stuff, even more stuff";
HtmlMeta myMetaTag = new HtmlMeta();
myMetaTag.Name = "robots";
myMetaTag.Content = "noindex";
Page.Header.Controls.Add(myMetaTag);
Does the trick.
Cheers,
Mike.
Not sure why this got migrated here since it's really a programming question. To answer the SEO aspect: yes, all pages should have unique titles that describe the page, and usually a relevant meta description.
Note, search engines are picking up all your pages, as a search for site:www.themorningtonpeninsula.com will show you. But since they all have the same title they are probably not appearing in normal searches.
For the technical side, you can definitely set the page title when using master pages in ASP. I think you can set the title when you create a new page, but if not the first line of each page should have the title attribute like in this code from one of my projects. Here the title would be "Help pages":
<%# Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master" CodeFile="Help.aspx.vb" Inherits="Help" title="Help pages" %>
I'm not 100% sure about the meta description but it should be possible to set that in the VB/C# code behind the page. If you can't get it working I'd recommend asking a more specific programming question on Stack Overflow.
do you know how google recovers the description of a website in their search results? is it the meta-description? the first paragraph?
Their algorithms aren't officially released to the public, but if there is a meta description tag, it takes that. Otherwise it generally depends on where the keywords lie within the body of the webpage. If someone is searching for "foo", a paragraph with foo in it will likely appear, with foo highlighted in bold.
Search Engines (including Google) crawl through the first introductory paragraph of the page or a post and takes that excerpt to put in the description when search results are shown. But there's a protection measure that one should take to be SEO friendly. If you are starting your page/post with an image, it negatively affects the SEO of that page because the search results are in text form and for that search engines won't understand the format of the image since they want a text description. In case of WordPress, use All IN One SEO Pack Plugin to manipulate the description if you are starting your post/page with an image.