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My title tag does have <title>xxxxxx</title>
I was wondering if anyone has had this happen to them before and what they did to solve it.
Thanks TerryS
Make sure the script you're using is not truncating any portion of the file you intend to serve. You can use [url=www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi]this[/url] to see what your page may look like to one of the various spiders.
Sorry awoyo I'm at a little loss to what you mean by "Make sure the script you're using is not truncating any portion of the file you intend to serve." I'm very new to this.
Thanks TerryS
-check to ensure you have the title in the correct page (i.e. cloaked and human visible page)
-awoyo is suggesting that the script may not be writing out the entire page, possibly cutting off part of it. So have a peek at "View Source" for the cloaked page to see if the title is actually there. Usually you can add your IP address to the IP list of your script so that it serves you the cloaked pages instead of the human ones.
-Ensure you don't have any syntax errors in your HTML code.
Are all SE's showing your page(s) with "no title" or do some show it while others don't? or are you serving the same cloaked pages to all engines? If you are serving the same page(s) to all engines then this won't tell you much, but if you are serving different page(s) to different engines, then you may see a correlation between the ones displayed properly vs. the ones that don't.
Hope that helps narrow it down for you.
When the template is written this way:
<html>
<head><title>xxxxxx</title>
</head>
<body>
It will not show the title in SEs.
This is the change I made:
<html>
<head><title>xxxxx</title>
</head>
<body>
By moving the head tag down it showed the title in SEs.
Yea I know you all are probly going to say "didn't you know that !" Maybe not but something to remember.
Terry
Maybe I'm not completely understanding the problem, but I don't think the example you showed has anything to do with whether or not a search engine displays your title. As long as the tags are correct, the inclusion of space between html tags doesn't have any effect on whether or not they are read. Some designers (especially ones that like to use html editors like GoLive) insert a ton of space between tags while others write the code with very few spaces.
Another common practice with regards to SEO is code crunching. This involes removing all possible spaces between tags in order to improve download time and make the code a bit harder for snooping competitors to read. When this is done, your code goes from looking like this:
<html>
<head><title>xxxxxx</title>
</head>
<body>
to this:
<html><head><title>xxxxxx</title></head><body>
I've never seen any browser or spider have a problem reading code like this.
Also I'm curious how you were able to verify that the correction you made has caused search engines to now display your titles properly. Since your first post was yesterday, it doesn't seem that enough time has passed for any changes you've made to show up in a search engine.
Can you provide us with a bit more info?
Actually what I did was add the IP address of my work station to simulate a SE and found no title showing on the cloak page that showed up. When I put a space between these tags and refreshed the cloaked page in my browser, surprise the title showed up. I reversed my actions and did another refresh in my browser and would'nt you know it the title did not show. Why I don't know but I think it has something to do with scripts and windows NT.
Terry
Terry
Cause it writes hidden characters that sometimes mess the code up.
But thats all I've heard. It's not set in stone. So don't quote me on it :)
