Title only in SERPS

[OrangeCrate]

I've seen several discussions regarding URL only, but have not found an answer to this...

My site pages show the correct titles of the pages, but there is no cache or snippet. Searches for keywords rank very well in results.

I'm confused as to what to do, if anything, to correct this. Could someone please comment?

[g1smd]

I have some (very few) pages that are fully indexed in some datacentres and are title only in some other datacentres...

Additionally in one datacentre I have some pages that can be fully indexed, title only, or even URL only depending on the actual search query used to find those pages.

[energylevel]

I think again probably all point to most likely duplicate content, have you checked your titles, meta descriptions and on page copy and makde them as baried and unique as possible?

[g1smd]

This only occurs in some datacentres. All I see it as, is that Google has incomplete data in some datacentres. Site looks fine in all other respects (not my own site, by the way).

[g1smd]

Post #31 should have begun:

"I have found some..."

[OrangeCrate]

Based on what has been suggested here, I made a list, and I've checked it twice (as they say this time of the year)...

I've reworked my titles and descriptions to avoid duplicate content, and I've looked for errors in the html code (though I have limited talent in this area).

I'm not sure how to do the different data center thingee, the best I've been able to do is to use Firefox, and Internet Explorer to see if there are different results.

All eight pages are "title only". As mentioned, I'll watch and see what happens, and will report back here if I get results.

Thanks all.

[g1smd]

Google has many datacentres. You access an individual datacentre by using the IP address rather then google.com; they all begin 64..., 66..., 72... or 216....

[OrangeCrate]

g1smd,

O.K., I get it now. I did a search and found a list of all the current data centers. I'll start checking.

Thanks.

[OrangeCrate]

I checked 20 data centers at random off of the list using my key search phrase. The good news is that I came back #1 (out of 4-5 million results) on every one. The bad news is that they were all "title only".

In retrospect, I think I may have been a bit guilty of the duplicate content issue in my descriptions. I hope my changes will make the difference.

[leedslad73]

Sorry, I'm lazy and haven't read each thread in this post - the problem you are having through with the URL and no cache I have seen many times on my own travel site.

The problem is usually with duplicate content - either on your own pages, or copied content from another website. The best solution is to write unique content, meta tags etc on every page and then wait for Google to respider the site - you'll see in a few weeks that the pages appear back.

I did just that and all of my pages are now indexed properly.

[OrangeCrate]

An update...

The new titles and descriptions have shown up in Yahoo and MSN, but the SERPS in Google are still "title only". No description. No cache.

[texasville]

Your lack of description is due to google diverting most of it's resources to unknown projects currently.
I use the snippets from the first few lines of text, which are the most relevant and describe the page.
Google indexes mine fine.
But- there is something going on right now that is causing only main pages to be indexed of new sites, pr reverting to before last update and then springing back to current, etc.
Spidering is going on but indexing is not. I don't believe it is jagger- I think google abandoned that quite a while back- but I do believe we have gotten hints that we are going to get a major, major update in the next few weeks. (Perhaps to be named "Big Daddy?")
Hang on til then and your sites will probably appear as they should. Like I said-all signs show google is using resources heavily in some project and is rotating serps thru dc's to hide what they are doing.

[OrangeCrate]

Final update for now...

I made changes to the titles and descriptions following the guidelines presented in this thread.

Though I rank well for all of my keyword searches, Google still lists just the title on each page. No description, no cache, no snippets.

I appreciate everyone's comments, suggestions and help.

Thanks.

[theBear]

OrangeCrate

If you have a robots directive of noarchive you will not have a cache, if you have a robots directive of nosnippet the other lines will be gone as well.

[OrangeCrate]

Bear,

No robots directives. It's a simple 9 page site generated by FrontPage.

I've not seen another site listed like this. URL onlys, of course, but not one with the title only.

Thanks for the idea, it's appreciated.

[Sobriquet]

I use the snippets from the first few lines of text, which are the most relevant and describe the page.
Google indexes mine fine

Ditto.

i have always used the introduction lines of my page content in the description tag and they appear on the page also. most of my pages have been in page one in serps. the descriptions are also listed fine.

while reading this thread, i wondered is everyone is doing something else ( making description diffrent from a snippete from the page content ), so i must be wrong ... but practically checking it out on multiple top ranking sites, I guess using a part of page content as description may not be all that bad.