Page titles and descriptions are disappearing - a huge amount recently

[vphoner]

I did a site command on my website, and I noticed very few pages that had descriptions, the rest were just the web address listed. What does this mean? Why do most of the pages now have no description? I have no searches from Google today, I usually get at least 10-20. Very unusual and I notice it happening on more than one site.

Anyone else notice this when they do the site command?
Shortened listings containing only the web address?

[paradoxos]

One of my sites lost it's title and description as well? What's up?

[FromRocky]

This is what Matt Cutts said:

1. Need more links to the site

2. Link to higher PageRank to get more crawling

3. Robots.txt prevents crawling

4. Can see the references to the url, but unable to crawl the url.

[Powdork]

Whatever the cause, it is bad. Typically, when a page goes url-only you can't even find the page by searching for on page text in quotes. You know hwat that means for being returned in results.

[Vimes]

Hi,
I've seen this happen on a few sites, but when I check the "Test" dc the pages are indexed fully. The sites I’ve noticed this happen to, are having problems in the index as they seem to be using an actual redirect from

domain.com/
To
domain.com/index.htm

some us a 301 and others 302.
Rather than letting the server show the default page.

Could this be the problem, have you checked the test dc's to see if those pages are fully indexed?

Vimes.

[Dayo_UK]

Intresting that the problems you are seeing are related to the index page and that on the test DC you are seeing pages being crawled correctly.

As is commonly known Google has had - and still has - problems with homepages/root pages - they can easily be hijacked or wrongly allocated (as in Homepage Canonical problems)

Hopefully as the test DC develops more of these problems will be solved as this is exactly what it is targetting.

To me it seems we are in a state of limbo at the moment - the old index with all its problems seems to be hanging in there - while the new index just does not seem ready yet.

[Lorel]

I've also seen this happen when there is not enough text on the page, i.e., a page displaying a image and very little text to describe it which means the template is larger than the body text. If none of the other problems mentioned above seem to fit and you have very little text on the page try adding more text.

[stevelibby]

this has happened to me as my home is not being listed or updated, yet the remainder of my site is?
I am at a total loss as to what to do!

[phantombookman]

I think this is often a glitch with googles spidering or indexing.
There are occassions when it can be site related or a semi penalty but..

I often see pages go URL only, just to return to normal a week or so after, this includes PR6 wiki pages etc and top 3 matches so it is not just as Matt says.

[tedster]

I have seen this problem be fixed by making sure each page has a unique title element and description meta tag -- at least the regular listing returned within days of that change. If you don't already have unique title and description, it's a good thing to do no matter what.

[texasville]

Just checked mine and same thing. Almost half of my pages have gone url only in last 24 hours. Even the test dc.
All my pages have unique title and description.

[caveman]

I think (but not at all sure yet) that there may be multiple issues right now...at least one of which is related to tedster's comment.
- Dup content issues
- Canonicals, again

Do people see either of these two issues relating to the problem:
- Too similar/identical page titles/META's involving homepages, or,
- Relationship to use of redirects? If so, 301's? 302's? (Yes, I asked about 301's as well as 302's.)

G simply cannot rely on Webmasters/sites being perfect if they really want to show all the good content, some of which is fielded by relatively non technical, small to mid sized site operators. No margin for error these days. :/

[trinorthlighting]

Seeing the same issue on my two sights. Ironic how msn and yahoo have no issues crawling and indexing my site.

[Komodo_Tale]

Something is up. The cache for my site is absent on all data centers. SERPS have not changed.

My guess is that we will see a major update in the near future.

The Komodo Tale

[Cathyy]

Stumbled on this forum while trying to sort exactly this problem with my own site.

We had been stable in Google for months until recently.

Now in the course of an hour I can search and find, not find, find...and so on and so on.

One minute we seem fully indexed, the next just the URL's.

Also, when we do show in the rankings if I click on 'cache' I get an error message, whereas in the past our pages were cached - in fact sometimes so much so that it caused problems for us.

For one search term I test on if we're there we're top of the listing and yet I can perform the same search 10 minutes later and Google acts as though we don't exist.

I'd appreciate any help/further information on this!

[theBear]

Komodo_Tale, bing bing bing we have a winner this critter thinks you have hit the nail on the head.

Hi caveman.

[tedster]

Per Matt Cutts of Google, they are developing what they've called "a new infrastructure" which has been represented on the Big Daddy datacenter (Google's name). We've got several threads here dedicated to watching the data centers in general, and Big Daddy in particular.

It's not an algorithm change (that's what we currently reserve the name "update" for), and Matt said on his blog that "It should be much more subtle/gentle than an update." But as this new infrastructure phases in and out of the live results, we are seeing some very odd effects. This area is most definitely one of them.

The changes will probably go on for a while -- on Jan 4 he said 1-2 months. If your sites are affected, I would suggest just strapping on your seat belt for a ride, rather than doing anything radical for a while. Of course, if you learn something about your site or your server in this process that isn't right -- certainly fix that.

[willybfriendly]

Well, this phenomenon has hit one of my sites, from the looks of it about 72 hours ago. Site has ranked well (top 10) across hundreds of terms. Traffic has fallen by about 50% now. Arrgh!

Unique title/description tags on all pages

Proper 301's in place.

This site has been well crawled and well ranked for at least three years. Titles and descriptions still showing on 66.249.93.104 on some pages, but not on others URL only on the main index - not even a cache - and some pages on 66.249.93.104 are not showing a cache either.

No black hat stuff on this site.

Very frustrating...

WBF

[RichTC]

Currently UK showing loads and loads of duel listings for some reason. Cant see any value to the user in this as its just reducing the top ten down to Five.

[Powdork]

On many data centers I have dropped from 44 down to 8 pages on one site. The pages are suffering from canonical issues on these datacenters. This is a small all html site with proper 301 from example.com to www.example.com in place, yet Google can't index it correctly.

[willybfriendly]

This is a small all html site with proper 301 from example.com to www.example.com in place, yet Google can't index it correctly.

Similar to what I am experiencing. Of a dozen or so sites, only one is effected (so far). It is probably the best of the lot - certainly the oldest, most content rich, most linked to and most respected.

Makes one suspicious of what the short term future might bring, doesn't it? Is there a MAJOR update just around the corner?

WBF

[Powdork]

Mine had previously (as of jagger) lost two pages to canonical issues and this had brought the index page's ranking from 1 down to between 3 and 5 until MC announced that [66.249.93.104...] was the DC that would have the BigDaddy results on it. There it had always been at #1 with all pages indexed properly. About 5 days ago those results started to spread a little, which was cool. At the same time those were spreading and traffic was coming back, the Big Daddy Dc started showing this index, which has lost 80% of my pages, including the index page and all the other important ones. Now, this index has spread to all datacenters.
Sometimes I think Google knows my billing cycle because they always seem to make the site disappear right when my clients receive their invoices.:(

[willybfriendly]

Big Daddy does not quite match up (yet) with what I am seeing on a normal search, but close.

I have not had any canonical issues in two or three years, though there is a section of the site that would probably be subject to this since I have not figured out how to preserve IBL's to old urls with query strings while redirecting to new urls without.

I doubt though that would effect the entire site like what I am seeing. The problematic part of the site lies in its own sub directory.

I miss the old days when it all kind of happened at once. Seems like anymore it rolls slowly across the web, and we hear squaking from different niches over a two or three week period of time.

Cripes, this thread started a week ago and I am just now seeing what people were referring to.

WBF

[Powdork]

Remember two things.
1. According to the 'sf giants' test, none of the DC's currently available are showing Big Daddy results.
2. The night is always darkest before the dawn.

I'm ready for a big update.

[colin_h]

I'd tend to agree with Powdork regarding the night always being darker before the dawn. This update has been in development for some weeks now and at every stage individuals get hurt. On a more positive note there doesn't seem to be a mad frenzy of disgruntled webmasters swearing about google ... as was the case with Alegra & Jagger. This could be a sign that google are using a softer approach to this update and testing the water before they go for a full switch to Big Daddy.

Hold on to your nerve and use that conserved energy positively ;-)

All the Best

Col :-)

[bluewidgets]

same here half site urls only ,but at BD 64.233.179.104
all pages normal and fresh cached.
Something is cooking

[willybfriendly]

Still seeing no title, description or cache this morning.

But, I am seeing 3 year old CNN stories showing in the SERPs. I haven't seen those for a long long time like maybe the Florida update back in '03...

Anybody else seeing anomolies like this?

WBF

[curlykarl]

I think Bluewidegets is spot on, 64.233.179.104 is the one to watch.

Missing descriptions fixed, and fresh cache dates (22 Jan)

:) woo hoo

[willybfriendly]

I think Bluewidegets is spot on, 64.233.179.104 is the one to watch.

I can only hope...

'twould give back all that is lost at this point :)

WBF

[herb]

Have been noticing this to occur each time we make a change in our sitemap
submission to G. Had about 15K pages in the sitemap. Cut it to 7K and saw all
(most) of the previous listed pages revert to URL only. These are for
archived forum pages. Seems to happen regularly on each change.

Still experimenting with this one.