Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The words added to the title shown in the SERPs are from body of the page itself, primarily from the left navigation, though not all. Some of the words added to the title are "Home" - meaning the homepage link at the top of the left navigation, and a word or two in addition, and some have "Widget Stuff" or something similar, which would be from the page <h1> Heading or text in the first paragraph.
At first I thought it was a serious error in the code in the head section causing it, but it seems that there are other pages on the site done exactly the same way that are not in the Supplemental Index and there was no such error shown when validating the pages.
Common factors different in this group of pages, some of which is different from the rest of the site that's unaffected:
--No Doctype, which shows up when the page is run through the W3C Validator. But neither do "normal" unaffected pages on that site have it.
--Instead of linked stylesheets, the affected pages have the <style> designations in the head section of the pages. All of the ones in the Supplemental Index have the styles done that way. The pages on the site that are indexed and not Supplemental have linked stylesheets
So either it's a parsing issue, or there's something wrong with how the code is in the head section - except that it does not show that there is using W3C validation, so I don't know for sure.
Is there anyone else experiencing Supplemental pages that have styles in the head section rather than using linked stylesheets?
And can someone please run by some link: queries to see if you're seeing anything like this with your page titles having extra words appended with Supplemental pages?
Do those pages appear as normal results when you use different keywords in the search, or when you do a site:domain.com or a site:www.domain.com search?
Be aware that site:www.domain.com -inurl:www always shows www supplemental results, even though it should show nothing at all (show all www pages that are not www pages).
[edited by: jatar_k at 6:38 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
People who fail to validate miss things such as unclosed head or href tags. If you do not have the right doctype, you can not fully validate the page.
In my case, the time was wisely invested because simply becoming w3c compliant boosted me to the top of the serps.
Sometimes the smallest mistake made will cause googlebot not to capture the content on the page.
Supplemental doesn't bother me in general, but those peculiarities with the page titles have me really wondering, to the point where I'm wondering if coding problems can be responsible for some people's pages going Supplemental.
[edited by: Marcia at 11:05 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
Yes, I have the same problem with one of my sites.
Snippet title is showing as the Title tag, followed by HOME, followed by first few words from top of the page.
The page I have looked at does have a Doctype (HTML 2.0).
The page does not use a <style> section in the header.
The page does not validate at W3C - one error is in the BODY statement (attribute bgcolor is unsupported, etc,etc), which may be relevant.
Having said that, other pages which are not supplemental, and whose snippet title display correctly, also use the same template and fail W3C validation in the same way.
I have not been keeping an eye on this site but I suspect the pages went supplemental because of a lack of IBLs. The problem may be in Google's processes that retrieve SERPS from the supplemental index, and not in the processes that put them there.
"But has anyone seen anything strange with the page titles, like I did?"
Yes, now that you mention it, most of my pages have been stuck in Google's 2005-era Supplemental index since mid-April. And shorter titles do have navigation bar text appended in results for site:www.mysite.com.
It could be just another Google programming inelegance. Then again, it could be a guidepost toward the fix that seems to be eluding them for the last three months.
In either case, nice catch, Marcia.
The pages I caught do have a doctype and all validate as 4.01 html strict according to the w3c tester.
The style sheets are linked, none directly in the head.
The similarity I saw was that those pages had less content and short titles. I'm not convinced that's the problem either though. Most of the titles are short and to the point and quite a few of the pages have rather a small amount of text.
I keep meaning to take a closer look, if I find anything I'll post again.
TITLE: "BLue Widgets on July 17"
META Desc: "About blue widgets on Jul 17" <- short meta description invites Google to dig into the page for more text to snippetize.
BODY: home / gallery / videos / blog...
Normal SERP:
TITLE "Blue Widgets on July 17"
Desc: "About blue widgets on Jul 17...home. gallery. videos. blog..."
Corrupt SERP:
TITLE: "Blue Widgets on July 17 home. gallery. videos..."
Desc: "About blue widgets on Jul 17...home. gallery. videos. blog..."
This should work (anyone see a counter example?)
TITLE: "BLue Widgets on July 17"
META Desc: "About blue widgets on Jul 17 as I was surfing WebmasterWorld and found this thread about Google goofing up again."
BODY: home / gallery / videos / blog...
Then again, I noticed Google's been tweaking their snippetization process and they may have just temporarily crawled pages with a bugged spider.
So yes, it's a Google problem, and I don't think there's anything you can do to "fix" it - you just have to wait for them to get your data cleaned up - maybe it's when you get re-spidered.
Should we remove robots txt?
