Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Author Byline in Page Title in SERP
-
I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick?
We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high
-
Well, My thinking is that for whatever reason Google thinks that the title has to be longer than suggested by that plugin and for whatever reason is pulling the authors name. The only way I see something changing is too make title longer or remove/rename author.
-
Interesting, I never really considered Sailthru - which we use for a variety of functionality and CRM - to impact how the pages show up in SERPs. I did a search in Google News for "leafly cannabis" and I'm still finding this page to be the only one showing up with the name being pulled into the SERP title. It won't let me post this as an image attachment for some reason, but here's a screenshot of the first page, which also includes shorter titles that aren't having this issue (http://imgur.com/a/pGhdZ). I've looked at this specific page up and down and can't really find any other reason than that for the issue.
Thanks for taking a look!
-
Ok, Now I see it. I didn't understand you were searching in News section. And here is the reason why it comes up like that - you are using some type of plugin called "Sailthru Horizon" and you have a title setup there as "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You" and author specified as Patrick Bennett. It's very typical for google to pull such info for News section. Basically it's like twitter card. So, try changing the title to longer one.
-
Thank you for your response!
I'm using anything from "how to find best high," "best hight," and anything else I can think of that triggers it in the News results. And it's still showing up with "Patrick" in the title for all of them. I've also tested in Chrome Incognito mode, Safari private browser, and just a Google search on my logged in Chrome browser.
It's definitely keeping me stumped >__<
-
Howdy.
For me tit comes up without Patrick, like this: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You | Leafly", which matches your page title.
The titles displayed in search are created automatically based on query. The only way to influence it is to have explicitly set <title>tag, which you do. So, if it still shows up with patrick to you, try different browser, in incognito mode. See if it's the same. if it is - post the query you are searching.</p></title>
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
How i can increase my page authority?
Hi, I have website and i want to increase my page authority. My website is latestdatabase.com I have making more backlinks but not good page authority so far. Please give me suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LatestMailingDatabase1 -
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Sitemap in SERPS
What's up guys, Having some troubles with SERP rankings. My sitemap (navigation) is appearing instead of my actual keywords. I have tried a few methods to fix this; setting a preferred domain, using a 301 redirects, deleting out of date pages via Google webmaster tools. Nothing seems to work. My next step was to refresh the cache for my entire site - does anyone know how to do this? Can't see any tools... Any help would be great. Cheers, Jon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjk240