Truncated URLs instead of Titles

since the last major crawl

[webdude]

3 days ago, googlebot made a very pronounced visit to one of my sites. Hit just about every page there was. Now when I do a site:mydomain.com, a majority of the links do not have titles. I have seen this before and if you wait a couple of months, the titles will appear.

But what has me concerned is that on some pages that have not been touched, it seems that the title (that was there last week) is now gone and has been replaced by a truncated url that looks like this...
example.com/somepage.taf?_fun...

The link is still whole (if you click on it it goes to the correct page), but the way the pages are displaying is wacky.

Anybody here have a clue as to what might be causing this drop of the title page and it being replaced by a truncated URL?

Thanks for any responses.

[edited by: ciml at 12:44 pm (utc) on April 21, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[webdude]

Sorry,

I am bumping this to the top. This has got me perplexed and It took a while to get it on here.

Thanks

[tedster]

I'm seeing an increase in this phenomenon, and I haven't discovered any definitive reason. A few months ago, this was always the way pages displayed when Google "knew" they were there because of inbound links but had not spidered (or couldn't spider for some technical reason). But it's happening more much often now -- and it's happening to pages like yours that were previously fully indexed and cached.

The truncation in the title position is probably just a character limit, from what I've seen. As you mention, the link still goes to the correct page, it's just the visible text that is cut off. Long title tags get truncated, and that's really all this is -- using the url in place of the true page title.

I can't say for sure what is disconnecting one part of Google's pile of data from other data we know they have. It sure hurts click-through when a title tag and description go missing. It may a side-effect of some shift on the Google backend (and if so, it may go away) or it may be something else -- like a decision not to use historical data when spidering gives poor results. I sure don't see any solid pattern to this yet, except it does seem to follow after a full spidering.

The only thing I've done about it so far is to verify that the server is doing everything it needs to be doing: that latency is minimal, proper mime types and HTTP headers are being sent and so on. And I have seen pages reappear in their full glory after changing a server-side issue -- but I cannot say I've uncovered a cause-effect relationship yet.

In one case, we turned on http compression and saw things shift in the Google SERPs within days...but the Googlebot that visited was not one that asked for compression. Maybe kicking the server into serving gzipped pages when possible also changed something else that helped. As I said, it's still a mystery to me.

[webdude]

Hi tedster,

Thanks for replying!

It is not the title of the page that is being truncated, but the URL which has now replaced the title. Example...

This is how the page was normally diplayed...

This is My Title
This is my description.
mysite.com/ - 34k - Apr 20, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Now the same page is being displyed like this...

mysite.com/mypage.taf?_fun...
Similar pages

I wouldn't normally worry about this, it usually straightens out, but my 2 word money phrase dropped (might be coincidence) at the same time from #4 to #14. My 3 word money phrase dropped from #1 to #10. I am trying to figure out if this is related or not. The site has been keeping it's numbers in the SERPs for the past year with no hiccups.

Thanks

[tedster]

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that the page - without its true Title or abstract - still ranks for a given keyword. Seems like one of two things must be happening. Either the data from a previous spidering is still influencing the rank, or the inbound link text is strong enough to carry your page into the search results. When the change is accompanied by a drop in position, my guess is that the anchor text in the IBLs is what's carrying the burden - and the drop came because on-page factors are not currently being factored in.

But that's a guess. Yes, I am concerned whenever I see this happen to an established page. It definitely hurts traffic plus whatever results that traffic is generating, whether sales, leads, newsletter sign-ups, whatever.

[adb64]

I also noticed this for a lot of my pages. They used to be presented with a title and description but since the beginning of March a lot of pages were only listed with the URL. Now, very slowly, G starts to re-index those pages and lists them again with title and description although some also disappeared again.
What I also note is that, on my bi-lingual site (Dutch and English), only the pages in Dutch re-appear while their English counterparts are still being listed with URL only and I hardly ever see Gbot crawling these English pages, it only crawls only the Dutch pages. The server is located in The Netherlands, maybe that has something to do with it.

Arjan

[tedster]

Let's just consider it a good-natured hazing ritual, done right before Google gives you a lifetime membership in the Top Three Club. ;)

[Jakpot]

Well, I feel like it's a game of drop the soap
in my health club shower. LOL

[TheET]

Have you got both www.domain.com and domain.com listed?

The title seems to disappear when Google lists both versions.

a 301 of domain.com to www.domain.com should help overtime, if this is the case

[webdude]

The www part of the domain has always been a permanent redirect to mysite.com. All incoming links go directly to mysite.com. I have been setting up all my sites this way for the past 3 years with, what I thought, was no ill effect. In the logs, other then the errant once a week link where someone added the www to the domain (always typed in as far as I can tell because the referring site is always foreign), it shows all access directly to mysite.com.

I don't think that is the problem.