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I have no idea what is going on here, but I saw a few instances just a few moments ago myself. This was first reported on WMW where a member noticed that Yahoo was changing the titles of his site's listing in the search results. Yahoo was replacing a shortened lowercase different title for its normal title that was Uppercase longer and the accurate original title used on the site.
At first members wondered if Yahoo was just playing hooky and messing with Dmoz titles or even Yahoo Directory titles. This was not the case, as most of the sites mentioned don't have Dmoz or Y! listings.
Join the discussion and outrage at WMW - Yahoo Replacing Site Titles
Update by Barry: I wrote a long post with Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land on this, hope to have official word from Yahoo! soon.
Update 2 by Barry: This has been fixed now, Yahoo! Fixes Titles in Search Results Sourced From Internal Anchor Text, Thanks Tim!
Comments:
Gabs
01/16/2007 12:02 pm
Yep been seeing this with a new site i've got.. If you type in the name of the domain its return that as the title.. No dmoz / yahoo dir etc.. Its 100% rewriting
Gabs
01/16/2007 12:05 pm
update on re-test.. my domain is 2 words e.g. bestfishing If I run a query on "bestfishing" without " then its returning "BestFishing.com" The capital are the interesting thing to me..
Gabs
01/16/2007 12:07 pm
Sorry should of posted this in one go but bestfishing works too.. returns "bestfishing.ro" http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkjMfv6xFNkoB5.JXNyoA?p=bestfishing&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&fp_ip=UK&x=wrt&meta=0
PPC Guy
01/16/2007 03:39 pm
It might have something to do with Yahoo Submit Express. A while ago I noticed that the titles on the 1st page listings were coming up with weird results. For example, the title was replaced with the actual URL of the website. I later found out that these same sites were participating in Yahoo Submit Express.
Gabs
01/16/2007 03:42 pm
My sites title is changing and I don't pay for submit express.. Site is less than 2 months old
Tim
01/24/2007 05:44 am
We launched a fix to the issue with lower case titles coming from anchor text. You should notice some changes tomorrow. Tim
Barry Schwartz
01/24/2007 10:59 am
Thank you Tim!
John Bermont
05/06/2008 09:46 pm
This is not fixed. At least two of my pages turn up in lower case on Yahoo search. I notice that some other sites are in the same boat. How does this happen? Is Tim still around?