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/
Related
I have added in the bottom of my html like this (just like how stackoverflow has it implemented):
<noscript>This site works best with Javascript is enabled</noscript>
but in one of my pages that has very little text, the text "Javascript is disabled" appears in Google search.
Is there a way to tell Google to avoid indexing this part? Or is there a better alternative instead of using <noscript> tag?
The issue is that Google often won't render Javascript. It can - but it often won't.
You either need to present a pre-rendered page or provide it with a meta description that accurately describes the content. Look up tags and how Google uses them to embellish it's search listings.
Other options like or can encourage Google from deviating from the provided description. However, a pre-rendered page for it to scrape is always more reliable.
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.
"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.
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.