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?

[Powdork]

So perhaps instead of having a link to Google on our site, we should have a link to [64.233.179.104...] on our site. And then change the link to whichever dc our sites are ranking on.;)

My site is also fully indexed there.

[ramachandra]

Google is getting weird with this new so-called building infrastructure.

I am seeing all possibility of canonical issues for couple of my sites examples like

If I search with site: command I can see both pages

www.mysite.com - with title and description
www.mysite.com/index.asp - with title and description

and if I search with this command site:mysite.com -site:www.mysite.com, here I can see non-www pages root pages as supplemental pages

mysite.com
mysite.com/index.asp

I have made 301 redirect from non-www to www, now what about the www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.asp page which is been into Google index and treating as two separate pages.

[Pico_Train]

Ramachandra,

You might have already done this but check your entire site and make sure all links pointing to the homepage are coded as "http://www.mysite.com" and not "http://www.mysite.com/index.asp"

That could help sort that out.

Rosco Pico Train

[ramachandra]

Hello Pico_Train,

I cross checked twice with all the pages and none of the pages are pointing to /index.asp. Previously the 301 redirect code was pointing server header as /index.asp might caused the problem, but my point is not that, my point is Google index stored all four possibility pertaining with canonical root page issue so my site couldn't able to get into Google SERPs and Google has to resolve / overcome this issue.

[jcmoon]

Three of my sites previously had between 120,000 and 190,000 pages listed in a site:mysite.com query on Google ... now, they're all down 65-85%. Similarly, many of my competitors' sites are also down (or, in some cases, up) by a large margin.

I also note that pages in my sites that're more clicks away from the homepage aren't appearing in the SERPs these days like they did last week. Usually I'll have a level-4 page show up in the top 3; today, it's a level-3 page and it's anywhere between #10 and #80. There might be the URL of the level-4 page, but that's all.

For the record, my sites only *have* ~50,000 pages each (90,000 or so URLs if you count all images), so I naively hope that this means Google's narrowing things down and purging their index of old, broken, abandoned links.

Note: One strange thing: the indexing of my sites are down, and my organic rankings appear to be down when I've checked ... but my traffic is actually UP! And it's still from the same mix of sources as before (same percentage of organic, ppc, direct, other SE's, etc).

Go figure.

[willybfriendly]

FWIW, title and desciptions have reappeared for the site I spoke of earlier, and it appears that most of the rankings have been restored.

Calm before the storm?

WBF

[security56]

I have the same issue, as of 2 weeks ago half of my pages have gone to url only, but if you search at [64.233.179.104...] the title and description is there, so is this a something that's going to be for ever or google going to be nice and give my links title and descriptions back :) I lost almost half my traffic when this happen. This topic at list gave me a little hope that it my be an google issue.