Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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?
The Google listings have the title, and frankly, rank first in the SERPS for each of my keyword phrases, so I know they have the content. But, there is no cache, description or snippet. Just the title.
The site has been picked up correctly by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, but Google is, and remains a puzzle as to why the cache, etc. is not displayed.
I've put my thinking cap on, have rewritten all of the descriptions, and have just published them to the web. I'll wait and see what happens.
If there are other ideas, I appreciate hearing about them...
I'll post in this thread to let you know how it comes out.
Definitely wait at least a week. Then check the versions of your pages google has in its cache (click the link called cache under your search result), look at the source code for the cached page to confirm it has your revised descriptions and see how they affect the search results.
It can get confusing if you change more than factor at a time! Change one thing, assess the impact, then move onto optimising the next thing for the search engines.
Good luck
There is no "Cached" button. Just "Similar pages".
The search result gives the title of the page only on the first line. Then, my URL on the second line, with similar pages. No description or snippet.
Doing some random searches, I don't find anyone else listed like that. Some URLs only occassionally, but not a listing like mine.
As I mentioned previously, my results rank first in every keyword phrase search.
is this a problem in doing this as I've been revamping some of my older sites to kick them back into life and have been using snippets of text from the content
I think it can be yes ....
One problem I've had with Frontpage and Titles is editing the Title. Look at the HTML source itself, checking your Title /Title section.
Check if instead of spaces you have many "nbsp;nbsp;" in sequence in place of what is rendered on display as a space. There was a time I was purposely putting "spaces" in my Title's. I didn't realize that in some cases, perhaps after an edit of the Title, Frontpage would substitute the "nbsp;" (Non-Breaking SPace)in place of each and every desired space. Technically this should not be a problem, but it seems to me I've seen problems any time encoded characters show up in TITLES instead of the basic text, ampersand (&), is another example, in the HTML title Frontpage may place "amp;" or whatever the encoding is. I believe search engines do not like seeing this in Titles.
The "nbsp;"'s can make your Title appear extremely long in character count to all the search engines, but it looks fine wherever it's displayed
In html mode do a site wide search for "nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;". I search for 3 to find Title problems, you'll probably find many pairs of nbsp's in your content and that's pretty much normal and tolerated.
I can't remember for sure, but I believe for some of my pages the Google SERP listing was corrupted, perhaps in ways you describe. So check your HTML source!
Also, I just noticed recently that I've left behind several hidden hyperlinks as well; your editing a page and remove the hyperlink text, but whoops the link itself is still in the HTML source. Google explicitly lists this "hidden links" as a no-no, and Frontpage makes it easy to do accidently.
Frontpage and all html editors have their advantages though! But Check Your HTML Source for reasonability too! Didn't mean to turn this into a Frontpage thread but it does cause problems like OC is having.
Hope this helps.
?
One of my sites listings descriptions is showing the desciption of the site as it appears on dmoz lol which it quite unrelated to the page, and not taking copy from the webpage homepage! How mad is that?
I think it's quite common. Google uses Dmoz for its own directory, so...
If the description doesn't reflect the site content, ask the dmoz peeps to revise it. I know they often make up their own titles/descriptions which aren't necessarily the best. I've had to request a few changes on Dmoz before and they do actually do them eventually.
make sure your meta descriptions aren't snippets of text taken directly from copy in your pages, make sure it is a unique block of text...
Thanks for that. Will check some of my pages that are suffering the same problem.
I've seen problems any time encoded characters show up in TITLES instead of the basic text, ampersand (&), is another example, in the HTML title Frontpage may place "amp;" or whatever the encoding is. I believe search engines do not like seeing this in Titles.
Didn't know that. Very interesting. I don't use Frontpage but do use & sometimes in titles. Will investigate this. Anyone else confirm this can be an issue?
It does help, thank you.
Having only eight pages, your suggestions were easy to check. No npsb html errors in the titles that I can see.
I also checked the hyperlink report. All seem to be correct and functioning. I don't see any hidden links in looking at the html.
But, that being said, I'm a user, not a programer. (I type, FrontPage does it's magic.)
I'd be humbled and grateful, if someone would be willing to take a quick look, and would forward my URL via sticky mail...
Other pages have descriptions made up of chunks of text from different parts of the page and mixed up. These seem to be indexed fine with snippet included.
I'll certainly pay more attention to this in future. Who said Google ignores descriptions? I'm sure I read that a lot in the past, but maybe things have changed...
Also, who said Google ignores descriptions? Keywords yes, descriptions are definitely quite important.
Google's standard answer has been that URL-only entries are for pages where Google has seen the URL in a link on another page but hasn't yet crawled and indexed the actual page mentioned.
The other way that a page becomes URL only is when Google thinks it is duplicate content; the next stage is that the page disappears from the index entirely.
Duplicate content can come in many forms:
- offsite, where scrapers are presenting your content elsewhere (not much control over that)
- offsite, where multiple 302 redirects point at your site (use <base> tag to counteract this)
- offsite, where you run multiple domains with the same content (point all domains to same server and use 301 redirect)
- onsite, where you have the same content at both www and non-www (use 301 redirect to fix that)
- onsite, where you use the same title and description on multiple pages (even though rest of page really is different) - make sure that every title and meta description really is different.
This latter point is most important as of the last few weeks.
Maybe though the lack of description in listings could lead eventually to a URL only entry, it seems to be a duplicate content penalty of some level ...
meta description = snippet of on page copy
This is something I've only come across myself recently, most of the other dup content penalties mentioned here by g1smd have been around for a while now and discussed a lot on webmasterworld..
[edited by: energylevel at 11:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2005]
I meant to add "Those are the major factors for URL-only listings at the present time, and I assume there is some overlap of those with Title-only listings, but I don't see many of those so can't give much more insight at present."
Google's standard answer has been that URL-only entries are for pages where Google has seen the URL in a link on another page but hasn't yet crawled and indexed the actual page mentioned.The other way that a page becomes URL only is when Google thinks it is duplicate content; the next stage is that the page disappears from the index entirely.
I expect this is true, but I've had pages go in and out of a "url-only" state. I've currently got pages that were listed normally in the past, and have now become url-only. There are also pages which were listed normally, became url-only, and then returned to normality. Sometimes I think it's because I've changed something on a page, but then it happens to a page I haven't touched at all, and ruins all my crazy theories as to why it's happening! Very frustrating...
