Strange Listing in Google

[MatBrummitt]

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on this...

I run an online shop selling cufflinks (http://www.online-cufflinks.co.uk) and I noticed the other day that when you do a search that should bring up my homepage, the TITLE of the result is not the title of the page...

Simply search for "Online Cufflinks" or "Cufflinks Online" and the result has a title that is "Online-Cufflinks"

but it should match the homepage's title of:

"Discount Cufflinks. Largest Selection Of Silver & Novelty Cufflinks".


Any ideas why this is? It's definitely not that it's using a DMOZ listing, as I have the relevant META tag in place for NOODP, so it's left me stumped.

Other searches that don't return the homepage have the matching titles.

Thanks for any insights.

Mat

 

[newguy]

Have you made any recent changes to the site? Maybe it's a temporary issue. I know you mention dmoz, but if you are heavily linked as "online-cufflinks" elsewhere this can happen too. I can't think why your site would be linked as that though, with the dash and all.

 

[JDubya]

Not sure, but "site:www.online-cufflinks.co.uk" shows the correct title for the homepage.

Also, if you search for a unique string of text from the home page such as: "Malcolm Smith was down on his luck, forced out of his job by redundancy" this returns the home page in the listing with the original title text.

Google will often display something other than your title - typically if you have what it deems repetitive keywords such as: "Blue Widgets | Blue Widget | Blue Widgets Online" might become "Blue Widget" in the SERPs.

My guess would be that as your title doesn't contain the term "online cufflinks" - it is trying to automatically increase the relevancy of your site to the search query in the listings as it has deemed it highly relevant. You could try replacing in the title "Discount" with "Online" and wait to see if it changes things. But this is just guess work...

 

[wb]

Answer above by JDubya is correct

[youtube]NlJiLDn9-38[/youtube]

 

[Bravetart]

JDubya is spot on. Been seeing this more and more of late. Quite often see it if you've overdone the anchor text links also and Google has appended the anchor text in front of the title.

On a side note, I always find it interesting that people use the noodp tag, I actually think it works pretty well as your DMOZ listing title will be far neater than your optimised title in many cases. Google only uses the DMOZ title for brand terms, so it actually maximises the CTR as it strips out the keywords, thus making the emboldened brand stand out more on the results page. Not applicable for an EMD though and of course, you should be dominating for your brand anyway

 

[doodlebug]

My view is that Google doesn't always use the title you created, Google sometimes uses a section of your content for the title or description although to be honest I've sen happen more for the description and not the title,maybe that's what they've done ?