Title in Google different from source code? - seo

I've been doing a job for a client recently and I noticed something strange about one of their competitors sites.
The title and description listed in Google is different to the one that's in the pages source code, I know this isn't just a case of index lag, because the sites been like this for quite awhile.
I'm thinking it must be some kind of SEO trick, because the title in the source code has about 3 or 4 keywords in it, where as the title that displays on Google is just the name of the company and 1 keyword.
Any ideas what's going on here?
Cheers

This is normal. It is a well-known phenomenon.

Related

Google Merchant Center - Inaccurate availability (due to inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website)

I've gotten a message that my site may be knocked off of Google Merchant Center due to "Inaccurate availability (due to inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website)".
This affects only a small amount of products (only around 0.3% of my 40,000-ish products), so I know it's not an engine issue. After asking Google to recheck the results, they came back with the same error, but with a completely different list of products with no overlap, so I know it's not a problem on the individual product level.
There's no geo-locking on these products, and Google says that the problem exists on US IPs.
Nearly all of the errors look like this:
Value on the landing page - v:out_of_stock
Value in the data feed - v:in_stock
Performing an audit on the products in question shows that none of them have been out of stock for weeks, so the data feed is correct.
None of Google's suggested common issues (geolocking, buy button not working, product can't be shipped to an address, products not available country-wide) seem to apply. The country Google checked this on was a US-based IP.
I'm running out of ideas here, does anyone have any other suggestions?
The answer turned out to be something silly for my site, but I'm posting the answer here just in case this helps someone else.
Google's crawler was setting their country to be Andorra and attempting to check out using the US site. This is obviously not a good representation of the US experience. Google advised us that this was a mistake on their crawler's part, and that we would pass the next audit without any modifications. So if you're here looking for a solution, the absolute best advice I can give you is to find a phone number for Google Merchant Center and give them a call because the error may not be on your end at all.
Update: We passed the audit with no changes made on our part.

Why is PrestaShop redirrecting to a random product when selecting variations from front-end?

I have an online shop in development, all went well until I decided to do SEO on the shop. After this, if I chose a product variation from front-end it just redirects me to a random product.
This picture describes the first state. The default product load.
This picture describes what is happening after you select a variation. As you can see the product name stays the same, but the link indicates that a totally different product is displayed.
If I have the debug mode enabled when selecting a variation it throws "An error occurred while processing your request" and in the request file I can see that besides some errors (Deprecated: array_key_exists(): Using array_key_exists()) it shows the request for a different product.
I can't understand why this is happening, so I am in dying need of your help.
That's the way Prestashop 1.7 works :
First time a customer lands in a multi-variation page, the default attribute will be loaded,
URL will show only the ID product.
Once you choose an attribute , an AJAX call will refresh the page
with the current attribute and URL will change with id_product-id_product_attribute value.
Not sure what you mean by "random product" as in both of your examples I see an attribute
being selected.
Anyway there are several (paid) modules to change this behaviour in a better SEO perspective,
this is definitely one of the most famous :
https://addons.prestashop.com/en/url-redirects/16633-pretty-urls-seo-friendly-url-remove-ids-numbers.html
EDIT: Just noticed that the ID product is different in the two screenshot, this could be related to some DB issues with attribute too, you should check if you have some not coherent values between id_product and id_product_attribute(s)
I found a fix for this. Apparently or appeared because I was using the duplicate function for uploading products. I don't know why but on some products it makes this behavior.
I've spent over 12 hours to find a explanation for this and I was unable to find one. The PrestaShop forum straight up banned me for posting this topic.
My advice is to NOT USE PRESTASHOP it's and old sistem and full of bugs, the support is expensive and I get the impression that even they don't understand their system.
If you find yourself in this situation, know this. Don't duplicate and upload products using "add new" function.
And I can't state this enough, do yourself a favour and don't use Presta, with all the expenses the time to invest and what the product looks like at the end of the road, is just a waste of time. Even after you finish is guaranteed to break in 1-2 years, any updates will break your store and you will need to invest even more more to fix it. It's an old, slow and buggy CMS. It's days are numbered.
Thanks a lot for help.
Best regards, Daniel.

google finance api alternative for monitoring/modifying portfolio?

I used to use google finance to create portfolios/change them and then display them on my site but since its being removed I'm wondering if there's any good free alternatives?
Basically I have a program that creates different portfolios based on different factors(20 right now), so each of the 20 links on my site direct people to a page that displays the portfolios. I am looking for something that I can use to automatically update the portfolios.
If it helps, my site is basically a free tutorial site that helps people learn how to manage their own portfolios. There's different lessons and then using market data & news(which I already get) I automatically generate a sample portfolio to show them how everything comes together. I liked google finance because they could see all of google's data but they could also click around and dig deeper if they want.
Is there anything I can use to get this result?
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you want, but it sounds like #DirkEddelbuettel's BeanCounter will do what you need.
Or, if you're just looking for quotes see http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm and http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

New site going on to an old domain

I have a client who over the years has managed to get their product to the top of Google for many different search terms. They're adamant that the new site shouldn't have a detrimental effect to their google ranking.
The site will be replacing the site that is on there current domain, as well as going up on to 5 further domains.
Will any of this lose the client there current ranking on google?
Google re-ranks the sites it has regularly. If the site changes, the ranking very well could... if more or fewer people link to it or if the terms on the site (the content) is different.
The effect might be good or bad, but uploading different content isn't going to make their rank go away overnight or anything like that.
Page Rank is most about incoming links. So if the incoming links won't be broken page rank will not be affected that much.
Though, overall ranking is not just Page Rank, so... further discussion is needed
if they retain current link structure they should be fine

Some undesired words appeared in Google's snippets, how to get read of it?

I know Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") are mainly come from META description. However, when one of my web pages shows up, there are some undesired words like price (which is not good at all). What I want it to show is just the description of the product rather than its price. Actually the price only mentioned twice in the whole page.
How could this happen? And how can I remedy it?
Including the price in the snippet is actually very desirable for most people. If your price is higher than the competition's for the same products they probably don't want to buy from you and check out other results instead.
To make sure the search engines don't see the price (and thus don't display it in the results) you should use JavaScript. I think even Amazon does this to prevent screen scraping in some cases. It should be easy, especially with something like jQuery.
$('#priceForProduct987A').html("$125")
You should be able to control the snippet displayed by google through the use of the meta tags:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
However the results displayed by Google in this case might be different if someone is trying to do some searching on a product. Google will then think you're shopping for that product and try to display the price of it. This might be the case for you.