Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I checked the serps for those keywords and noticed that my listing has a title of "widgeting ideas" insteaf of "Widgeting Main".
When I do a search by the url or using a combination of site: and inurl: to get the listing for that page, I see the normal title.
Is this something new happening with Google?
Is this something new happening with Google?
Is your Widgeting Main page by any chance listed in Open Directory (ODP)? If so, then it's clear cut what's happening, and it goes way back. Google attempts to return titles that best match the query, and when that match was better satisfied by the Open Directory title, Google would use it. Lots of Webmasters didn't like that, and Google and Yahoo (and MSN?) now support a "noodp" meta tag, which you can us if you want your page to return its own title.
Discussion on WebmasterWorld and on Matt Cutts' blog...
Google Supports NOODP Tag
[webmasterworld.com...]
Google supports META NOODP tag
[mattcutts.com...]
If the page is not listed in ODP, then Google may be getting the display title from another prominent directory link to that page, but I'm not sure of that.
I should say "Widgeting Main" is not a very helpful title to use on a page, and you might want to consider making it more search friendly.
The page I linked to had no title tag and originally came up in google as 'Untitled Document'; but as soon as I linked to it google gave it a title of exactly what I put in my anchor.
I wonder just how much trust google puts in me to (re)name other people's pages? Could I call it whatever I wanted to?
It seems like the title-based google bomb.
But that specific keyword, the one shown by google, happens to be in anchor of about 10 IBLs on various sites.
It's interesting to note that this can happen. I'm assuming this would not happen if you had a longer title that included the entire search phrase, on your page. You might also rank better with such a title.
If you want to test something, though, it would be interested to keep your current title as is for just a while and see if adding the "noodp" meta tag restored your "Widgeting Main" title. I've never had a page in Google that required "noodp," but had a strange glitch in Yahoo that was fixed by "noodp," and which took about a week to get changed. If you do try this, please report back.
