Google Title Tag Bug Causing Untitled Snippets?

Feb 1, 2012 - 8:55 am 17 by
Filed Under Google

Google Title TagYesterday Keri Morgret, a contributor here, SEOmoz associate and owner of Strike Models pinged me asking if I noticed complaints of people noticing Google labeling the title tag in the search results as "untitled."

This is not all that uncommon, especially if there is an HTML mess up with the title tag or Google gets confused with the site's true title.

At first, I thought it was a one or two off case and an issue with the site at hand. I looked into the code on one example and something seemed off in that case.

But now I am getting reports of more and more users complaining of this. I received emails and tweets of people showing me that a search for [adwords keyword tool] even shows an untitled blue link in the Google results:

Google Untitled Example

I am not sure if Google tweaked their title tag detection techniques recently, but it is possible something may be up.

Forum discussion at SEOmoz Forums.

Update: John Mueller from Google commented on this on my Google+ post saying:

John Mueller - +Aaron Bradley as far as I know, this is just a quirk with this particular URL, and not something general that has changed.

We are always working on improving how we pull and display titles in search (see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/better-page-titles-in-search-results.html ), but this particular URL is a bit of an edge-case that shouldn't be seen as a representative of any general change in that direction :)

 

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