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Is this some sort of penalty? The thing is if it was it wouldn't show in the serps, but with Yahoo displaying it like that no one is clicking thorugh! Any ideas as to why Yahoo wouldn't display / index the homepage properly?
the site isn't new, it's been around for 18 months and this has gone on for some time.
7. Yahoo "creates" a new title based on the incoming link's anchor text
Hi,
This is happening, I’m even seeing it on Google adwords/adsense adverts. Some of these ads are using 301 redirects on their URI and yahoo is displaying both URI's the redirected one with the adwords anchor text and the end URI with the correct title text.
But strangely enough they no longer rank for their targeted search term, they appear to be filtered, but how could they display the anchor from adwords in the first place?
Didn’t think Slurps had that capability.
Vimes
Since Yahoo is having horrible problems with 301's right now, it seem it is the same basic issue.
URls that have been redirected long ago but are displaying in the serps show this phenomenon, and so do pages where there URL is displayed without a trailing slash.
Yahoo just needs to learn to handle 301s. Souldn't take more than a decade or so...
===
Now that I said that, I also see the phenomenon hitting lots of pagename.html pages too, so those aren't having trailing slashes dropped. I guess the answer is just that Yahoo sucks.
I know it's not related to a penalty, I know it's not DMOZ or Yahoo dir titles, and it has nothing to do with robots.txt files or noindex tags.
My customers title tag is "Three Word KeyWord Store - Domain.com"
Yahoo has changed the title to "three word keyword" in lowercase.
It either has to do with anchor text pointing to the page or yahoo deciding to strip out everything but the keyword phrase.
I only did a search for "three word keyword" to see the results this morning so Ill have to wait until I can see them here at work to tell if "random keyphrase" returns "three word keyword" or something else.
If it returns something else for the homepage, I would conclude it's the search triggering the change and if the title is still the messed up one I would conclude it's the anchor text triggering the change.
Either way, it needs to stop.
[edited by: JeremyL at 4:41 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2007]
It may be anchor text triggered, one site mostly has 3 keyword anchors pointing at it and Y put title in lower case and removed 1st word in title that is not part of 3 keyword anchors.
Doing a search with The (which is 1st word in title) and 3 keywords brings normal title.
Have to wonder if this is Y's way of putting it to optimisers. If they don't like it they can not rank it but why mess with our sites too?
The first time, we were given an old title of the page, one that we used to use. But, all the words were in lower-case except for the last word, which is the name of our company and a proper noun.
This morning, it changed to a keyword phrase that is frequently used as anchor text. We also moved to the #1 spot! That same title is used elsewhere, we are #3 on another keyphrase but the first one provides the title in all cases.
I am thrilled about making #1, it's an amazingly competitive phrase, but the title...Lord it's killing me, it looks so much like spam!
Does anyone have any idea when and if Yahoo is going to fix this?
It's not that. I have one site, happily just a information site I don't make money on, that has one page showing lower case title that isn't there...while another page on the same site lists just fine.
Moreover, I've seen countless governmental pages listed this way.
As far as 301's go, I doubt that is the issue entirely either. Simply because the site of mine this has happened on does NOT use 301's.
I strongly suspect this has to be some odd bug running through Yahoo right now. The sites and pages within sites that has this happening too seem to have no traits "in common".
Wonder why on Earth Yahoo isn't attempting to fix this ASAP.
This little bug of their is making their SERPS looks like total garbage.
Jim
> Yahoo has some kind of "trust" policy. If it trusts web site(or its title) - it displays its title. If no - it looks for most commonused anchor text - and displays it.
It's not that. I have one site, happily just a information site I don't make money on, that has one page showing lower case title that isn't there...while another page on the same site lists just fine.
Could mean that Title replace/noreplace happens on per-page basis, not site basis. Re trust notrust, may be they want to make it easier to users. Not sure if it's for better or worse.
I've seen the SERP where 5 of top 10 are modified titles. The search was "blue someword widgets" (w/o quotes). Modified titles are:
Companyname1 blue widgets
comapnyname2 blue widgets
Comapnyname3 blue widgets
...
All original titles contain "blue widgets" and all have some part stripped off. Word "someword" is not even in text of some target pages, but that's another aspect of interesting Yahoo's algo ;) The stripped part in some cases is: #1, best, unbelievable etc. type of words (good), but in other cases additional meaningful information about the target page (bad).
IMHO the theory is proven.
Which theory, Witch?
VImes.
Vimes.
Make sure that any and every agent that visits the query-string URL is fed a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag on the page.
We launched a fix to the issue with lower case titles coming from anchor text. You should notice some changes tomorrow.
Tim
Should I take bets on how long it takes to fix?
Maybe not. Looks fixed already, from where I sit.
The Yahoo search result shows the title of my site as the title from the Yahoo directory, in upper and lower case.
fred - Take a look at this thread re the Yahoo Directory title...
Yahoo Formalizes NOYDIR Tag
[webmasterworld.com...]
