Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Normally when I see my pages listed in Google they use the page title as the active link. On occasion they return the DMOZ listing, which in my case is the company name. Something like this is usually returned:
Widget Central - First for plastic widgets
I have noticed that some of my results are having extra info added to the title, basically extra text taking the text up to its 80 character (?) limit. Like so:
Widget Central - First for plastic widgetsWidget Central - First for pl...
In every case it appears to be the title repeated, immediately after, without a space. In other words it looks like an error.
Any ideas?
"How to....bla bla bla..."
But what Google is showing for the title is just simply Example.com (substitute my site name here) and nothing else, no "How To..." sentence, nothing. Gone is my wonderfully descriptive wording.
Funny thing though is that it only does this to 1 page on my site, the other 35 pages are all perfect.
Only thing I can think of is they are using the title from the DMOZ Open Directory Project and ignoring my page title tag.
I checked my code over and over, it looks fine, can't be anything on my end.
But why would Google do this? Is it a bug in their algorithm?
I tend to beleive that they are doing it because they trust DMOZ even over our own tag, and they could be doing it to prevent spamdexers. So you often see people who keyword stuff their title like this:
"VIAGRA< viagra, VIAGRA PILLS, viagra pill.."
I'm sure you've all seen that. But if that same site had a DMOZ entry, Google might think it prudent to go with a trusted human editor chosen title, or perhaps something on the page triggered them to say "The heck with with it, just list his web site title and be done with it".
