Old site name showing in SERPs
-
Hi all,
We've recently re-launched one of our sites with a substantial redesign, refreshed content, meta data, descriptions and functionality.
We noticed in SERPs that some of the page titles are showing the old name for the site, which hasn't been used for a few years and the site's been through a few updates and a URL change since then.
All the meta titles showing up as they should in crawls through Search Console and Moz and it's my understanding that if Google were pulling a cached version of a title it would have gone for a more recently cached one?
Any thoughts on why Google's turned back the clock on our site's name would be greatly appreciated!
-Jamie
-
Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!
-
Hiya Dan,
Many thanks for your response, our site is: www.creditreport.co.uk
It seems like in the last week we've stopped experiencing this issue, but until we get to the cause of it there's always a possibility it could happen again.
Going by what you've said, I think it's most likely the 301 issue: our old site was much larger so there are a lot of pages currently getting 301'd to the homepage as there isn't a relevant alternative page to redirect users to at the moment.
Everything else you've mentioned has already checked out, I even did a backlink audit a few weeks ago because I had the same suspicion, but there weren't enough sites linking to us using the old name as the anchor text to cause an issue.
Thanks again for your help!
-Jamie
-
Hi Jamie
There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).
But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:
- Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
- Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
- Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
- Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.
ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.
But any details you could provide would be helpful!
-
Hiya James, thanks for your response-
It seems like we might be suffering similar issues if not necessarily exactly the same thing. Before our latest re-design we had a load more pages that were cut, most of them should 301 to the homepage, but some of those pages are returning a 404.
I think the main difference is that most of our page titles are showing up fine, reflecting our latest changes, but the homepage and another one about legal information have gone retro on us, which makes me think our site is at least getting crawled properly?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Confused about repeated occurences of URL/essayorg/topic/ showing up as 404 errors in our site logs
Working on a Wordpress website, https://thedoctorwithin.comScanning the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing a lot of searches for URL/essayorg/topic, coming from Bingbot, as well as other spiders (Google, OpensiteExlorer). We get at least 200 of these irrelevant requests per week. Seems like each topic that follows /essayorg/ is unique. Some include typos: /dissitation/Haven't done a verification to make sure the spiders are who they say they are, yet.Almost seems like there are many links ‘in the wild’ intended for Essay.Org that are being directed towards the site I’m working on.I've considered redirecting any requests for URL/essayorg/ to our sitemap… figuring that might encourage further spidering of actual site content. Is redirection to our sitemap xml file a good idea, or might doing so have unintended consequences? Interested in suggestions about why this might be occurring. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | linkjuiced0 -
How do I redirect old html pages to new site?
Im seeing in my Google search console some of my old html pages. I never redirecting them and now they get 404 errors. Below is my current htaccess file, how would I changed it so that any html page i.e. intercallsystems.com/index.html forwards to my new site intercallsystems.com ? I have about 5 html pages that I want to redirect. Thank you for the help! Rena Currently my htaccess says: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | palila
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
Unnatural links from your site
Hi, 24 February got this penalty message in Google webmaster tool. Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Already removed all the link on the blog and sent reconsideration request to Google spam team. But request is rejected. Please help me on this or share link with me on same case. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
What is wrong with my site?
I have been working hard for over two months on my sites in seomoz and have seen some nice results in some (www.etraxc.com/ and www-my-etraxc.com for instance. Still I am really frustrated by www.classroomconnection.us/. I cant even get on the first page with the search term "classroom connection." i would love some help on this one. On a related note, does it help to have links to YouTube videos about the content? If so, how do I ensure that this piece is working well for me? Thanks a ton!
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Any way to modify SERP site extension links?
I am not sure if this is doable but one of my clients have their website's SERP with sitelinks extension. In example. www.example.com -example1 -example2 -example3 -example 4 Anyway to modify the sitelinks on the SERP?
Technical SEO | | William.Lau0 -
Site Crawl
I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help
Technical SEO | | pakevin0