Anybody experiencing the no title / no description?

[bobosse]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if any of you are exepriencing the same issue I have: I just lanched a few sites, Googlebot grabbed it, but the SERPs only show the URLs, no title, no description...

Thanks! JMO

[martinibuster]

I just lanched a few sites

Patience young paduan. ;)

[Marcia]

I am still experiencing just the title and a tiny bit from the very top of the page being indexed - like only the alt attribute for the graphic and nothing else. And the site has been up for a while.

[BallochBD]

I still have no Title or Description (more than three weeks now since GoogleBot last visited my site). This morning I noticed that my PR has now dropped from 5 to 3. I know that GoogleGuy has contributed to this thread in the past, perhaps he will update us?

[Bobby_Davro]

I am seeing this for large numbers of pages on long established sites.

[Pricey]

Have you added your site to demoz and the google directory. The SERPS usually grab the description from there.

[Jakpot]

75% of my pages show only urls and Google will not
answer inquiries requesting an explanation of problem and when it might be solved. Strange silence. Another
"filter"?

[internetheaven]

Hundreds of my pages that have been in the Google index for over 6 months are now showing only the URL. So it's not just new sites that haven't been fully indexed yet and I disagree that Google gets its description from Dmoz, it uses text from the page.

[doc_z]

Googlebot grabbed it, but the SERPs only show the URLs, no title, no description

These pages are not (yet) in the index but Googlebot has found incoming links to it. Normally, you just have to wait some time. However, if the problem doesn't disappear I would try to increase the PR and/or get deep links to these pages.

[bobosse]

You are correct...today, several pages are now showing a title and description...however, 98% of my pages aren't...it must be some kind of updating process over the datacenters.

I also did a search on the pages that show a title/description using specific keywords, and the pages are no way to be found...yet.

JMO

[Bobby_Davro]

doc_z, unfortunately, I have been seeing this working in reverse. Google is actually losing data for previously cached pages and replacing it with just URLs.

[doc_z]

Bobby_Davro,

I guess that there are several reasons causing this behaviour. However, if these pages still have incoming links (with high enough PR), this should be a temporarily effect.

[BallochBD]

My site, which is in the same boat as the others in this thread, only has about couple of hundred others linking to it. However it is non commercial so this is fairly significant. Since the Googlebot stopped visiting at the end of January Google reports no links. I retained my PR5 until this morning when it dropped to three.

I just discovered today, thanks to Sunny, that I may have been penalised because I had placed hyperlinks within [H1] [/H1] tags. In my ignorance I was not aware that this was a problem. Can anyone confirm that this incurs a penalty and if so what I can do get back?

(Obviously I have now corrected this and as far as I can see my site is now as pure as the driven snow.)

[ThomasB]

BallochBD, would you mind sharing where Sunny mentioned that?

[BallochBD]

Thomas, I have stickied you about this.

[div01]

I have a 1 year old site with the same symptoms, Google knows about my problem. But since Yahoo! has dropped G, the site has once again become viable.

[BallochBD]

Div, I am also seeing an increase in traffic from Yahoo. My overall traffic is still well down because of what Google has done to me but what I am getting appears to be more targeted for some reason. Yahooooooo!

[BallochBD]

I have just noticed that the Googlebot visited my site twice this afternoon. On each occasion it only had a look at robots.txt and my home page before leaving. I seem to remember that there have been discussions on this in the past. I read the most recent but it did not really tell me anything. Can anyone explain why this is happening?

[SyntheticUpper]

If it's any comfort I've seen several authorititive sites very high in the serps in my day-to-day Google searches with these problems.

It's obviously a common problem.

If you have a robots.txt check it really carefully. Several times. Also run it through a robots text validator - but this just validates the syntax - if you are accidentally excluding something this can't help.

If I was in a similar position, having gone through the above, and I had a robots.txt file in place, I'd delete it. I'd also check for incorrect robots meta tags too, and then consider whether my host might have messed up.

Just my groat's worth.

[BallochBD]

In actual fact this is the first time I've saw Googlebot at all since 30 January so I am hoping that it is a sign that it is about to come back and index my whole site.

My robots.txt file is so simple that it can't be the problem. Anyway, I use the same one on a couple of other sites and they don't have any trouble with it. They are also with the same host. I am 99.99% certain that this is a Google action.

Do you think that it has come back today means that it may start indexing soon?

[Pricey]

I disagree that Google gets its description from Dmoz, it uses text from the page.

Sorry, my bad. I was thinking of the Description: and Category: bit. There is text above that which is grabbed off the page itself.

So you have:

Page Title
Grabbed text from the page content
Description: widgets
Category: Business > Business Services > ... >
www.mydomain.co.uk/ - 44k - 24 Feb 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

Phil

[BallochBD]

Still no sign of the GoogleBot. What did I do to deserve this? (Nothing according to all the other search engines.)

[pcgamez]

I e-mailed Google yesterday with this issue just to see if they ever respond.

Googlebot has indexed over 2,000 files on my site and it isn't showing up.

[BallochBD]

PCGamez, don't hold your breath. I am sure that Google has been swamped with email about this problem and they are highly unlikely to respond. As far as I know nothing has been done about it.

In another thread GoogleGuy offered to help where this was a canonicalization issue and asked sufferers to email him with this as a codeword but to my knowledge no one has yet recovered as a result. Anyone anything new to add to this?

[ThomasB]

Matt Cutts said that there are 3 reasons for that behaviour:
- Not yet indexed
- Problems with the URL (as just mentioned)
- penalty (didn't say what sort of penalty)

[johnser]

400 page site doing well in Google for past 3 months.

Only index page now showing the 2 line text extract.
No other pages have title / extract / cache showing

Not 1 visitor for past 72 hours.
Incredibly simple clean site. No robots.txt

If there is a penalty, why is there no cache / text extract?
J

[BallochBD]

Johnser, this sounds like a penalty and it is very similar to what happened to my site, which had been indexed for more than two years.

Thanks to Googleguy I found out that my site had been penalised because I had participated in a linking scheme with about nine or ten other sites. One of these was a bad neighbourhood that uses keyword stuffing techniques. My site was clean apart from this. Strangely, I got the penalty while the other site is still there (although not, I suspect, for much longer).

I would suggest that you look closely at the links you have to/from your site and also check to see if there is a possibility of a penalty for any other reason.

[BallochBD]

Has anyone got anything new to add to this one. I have tried a 301 redirect, changing my site, emailing Google, playing around with supposedly offending title tags and scrubbing my site clean of anything that could remotely be described as spammy but nothing has worked. I am still stuck with no cache, title or for that matter traffic!

I have had two responses from Google saying that they were passing my problem to their engineering department and in another thread GoogleGuy said that he would do this too but nothing seems to have worked.

I have now gone about 5 or 6 weeks without Google traffic and they appear to be unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

Has anyone else recovered from this yet and if so how?

[Jakpot]

I have not recovered. Still no cache, no title, just
urls on 75% of my web pages.
Wrote webmaster @Google on 3/2/04 but no answer.

[BallochBD]

Has anyone contacted Google and got a result on this?