Search Results With Missing Titles & Descr

what does this mean?

[austtr]

The usual display of search results is <title>, Google description, directory category, url, cache link, similar pages link.

What does it mean when the result shows as just:

www.widgets.com/bigwidgets.htm
Similar pages

Why no <title>, description and link to cached page.

[doc_z]

As far as I know this means that Google has not spidered this page so far, but has found an incoming link.

[Oaf357]

Bad syntax maybe?

[quotations]

I used to get that on several sites which were redirected and masked. There was no real content on the page which was spidered so google found no title, no description, no text, nothing but the url.

Once I finished those sites and upoaded the real content where it belonged, the listings changed and showed up as they should.

[bether2]

austtr,

I think doc_z has it right.

See tfelice's post (msg #173) in this thread and googleguy's response (at the bottom). Sounds like the same situation you mentioned.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Beth

[austtr]

bether2... good catch.

That's exactly it. Some of the sites in question have been around a long time and have links in and out so I'm surprised to see Google has never caught up with them.

[jdMorgan]

austtr,

This will also happen if the page is disallowed in robots.txt, but Googlebot finds a link to it. Since it can't spider the page because of the disallow, it can't pull the page's title and description.

For those who would prefer to avoid this situation with a disallowed page, the only solution I've found is to allow Google to spider the page, but include a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag in the page itself.

This applies to Ask Jeeves/Teoma listings as well.

Jim

[annej]

A couple years ago we were wandering around in our RV where I couldn't get online for about a month. The company that hosted my site didn't get the automatic payment due to a glitch and after emailing me with warnings (which of course I didn't see) they removed my site. I get to my daughter's house and totally freak. My site is gone. I wade through tons of emails and fine out why. I check my top keyword in the serps and I'm still #1. No site, no desc, no nothing but the url and whatever but it was still there.

So maybe you are finding a site that was temporarily down during the deep crawl or may be gone for good and Google hasn't figured it out yet. I got the site back up and it was as if it was never down. No loss on Google at all. The site had been down for at least 2 weeks. Nowadays many RV parks have a line just for people with laptops to get mail. So I make sure I check more often when we are wandering about.