More threads by Dana Franks

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I have noticed this happening on several clients over the past year or so, seemingly only on Wordpress sites - if we have a home page that's got a specific keyword at the beginning or nearly in the title tag - say "Bocce Ball Cleaning Wahoo AZ" - the Google searches for other pages on the site will somehow pull that keyword into the titles of other pages on the site, such as "Contact Us - Bocce Ball Cleaning Wahoo AZ" instead of "Contact Us | Happy Cleaners" as we've defined in the title tag of the page.

It won't do it necessarily on every page but on some of them, even for pages that don't relate to the subject matter of the home page or which are optimized for other cities. The title tags on these pages are filled in and there's seemingly no reason for Google to pull in other page content in for them. If you look at the source code the title tag showing on the pages affected is the one that we put in for it and that keyword does not show up anywhere on the page's source code.

Has anyone else had this happen for their site? If so, has it been a Wordpress site? I've wondered if there might be something in the back end that is causing it. The site name does not have this keyword in it, BTW. Is there any way to force Google to use the correct title tag without adding to it, or to indicate to Google that what is showing in the search is incorrect? I assume not, but I feel like there's something out there that is causing this and could be turned off or changed.
 
Google can and will change page titles/meta descriptions if they feel like they can come up with one that will better serve the users needs.

In most cases they actually do a good job. In your case, it sounds like they are a bit confused about the content of your website.

They are making that new page title because they think it's more descriptive and helpful to their searcher than the one you provided.
 


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If you leave the company name out of the title tag, Google will often insert it. Is that what is happening?
 
No, the business name is in there. In fact I changed the title tag on the home page to put the business name at the beginning instead of the main keyword in case it was just pulling the first word in there to add. It didn't make a difference.
 
Google can and will change page titles/meta descriptions if they feel like they can come up with one that will better serve the users needs.

In most cases they actually do a good job. In your case, it sounds like they are a bit confused about the content of your website.

They are making that new page title because they think it's more descriptive and helpful to their searcher than the one you provided.

It's strange because the title tags on those pages are more descriptive than the home page, and more relevant because the pages are about different locations or services. But oh well. I'll see what I can do about rewriting them. Thanks for the help!
 
If your homepage uses "Bocce Ball Cleaning Wahoo AZ" and that is what they are adding into other page titles across the site, they may be confused and think that is the business name.

If the business name truly is Happy Cleaners then it's probably hard for them to tell that's the name as it's not very descriptive.
 

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