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Why don't the SERPs show my title and descriptions?

Discussion in 'Websites' started by Help Desk, Aug 6, 2004.

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  1. #1
    Do a Google search for "site:www.thinkbling.com". Many entries will popup that do not have titles or descriptions. What is up with this?
     
    Help Desk, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #2
    Typically it's things that have not been spidered in awhile (I think the cache expires at some point in Google).
     
    digitalpoint, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  3. Such Great Heights

    Such Great Heights Peon

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    #3
    could it be this code at the beginning of the pages that don't have titles in the Google SERPs?
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

    I know it seems lame to guess that, but have you tried moving it down? does it need to be first?

    seems like the google bot is having trouble getting the titles from those pages.

    this is just my first guess.
     
    Such Great Heights, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  4. KeepItSimple

    KeepItSimple Peon

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    #4
    Yes, I think that Doctype tag needs to be on top of the HTML page before your Head tag.

    For the descriptions, I think Google tries to make "quality assurance", finding relevant text on the page where the keywords from the search query is strong and mixes that to a description.
     
    KeepItSimple, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  5. Help Desk

    Help Desk Well-Known Member

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    #5
    On my static pages (http://static.thinkbling.com) I changed the directory lists and the item details titles and descriptions to be unique per page. Before they where identical between all of them. Let's see if that makes a difference. It should only help.
     
    Help Desk, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  6. Lever

    Lever Deep Thought

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    #6
    As far as validation goes, the DTD needs to go first. Otherwise when you try to validate it you'll get an error something like...

    "The checked page did not contain a document type ("DOCTYPE") declaration. The Validator has tried to validate with the *whatever* DTD, but this is quite likely to be incorrect and will generate a large number of incorrect error messages. It is highly recommended that you insert the proper DOCTYPE declaration in your document -- instructions for doing this are given above -- and it is necessary to have this declaration before the page can be declared to be valid."​
    ...or something like that ;)

    This is the error you'll get if the DTD goes after any tag.

    Plus, "a DTD is mandatory for most current markup languages and without one it is impossible to reliably validate a document."
     
    Lever, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  7. compar

    compar Peon

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    #7
    If you want to see what the googlebot see when it crawls your page try Poodle Pedictor. I think this is just a great tool.
     
    compar, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  8. Old Welsh Guy

    Old Welsh Guy Notable Member

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    #8
    Google has been delivering more and more partially indexed results like this. Initially I thought it was because they might have shortened their time out during spidering to make up for the massive addition to their index. I thought this as it was pimarily dynamic pages that were suffering, especially cold fusion sites. Now it just seems to be happening more to large sites dynamic or otherwise.
     
    Old Welsh Guy, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  9. mopacfan

    mopacfan Peon

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    #9
    Compar, what is it about Poodle Predictor that you like? I guess I don't really see the attraction. (must be from beating my head against a wall too much)
     
    mopacfan, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  10. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #10
    I've also seen it in cases where Google knows about the page (from the link to it), but has not spidered it yet. There are cases where stuff that is blocked by the robots.txt shows up like that, and looking at the logs, Google never spidered it (but it knows about it from a page that links to it).
     
    digitalpoint, Aug 6, 2004 IP
  11. arestia

    arestia Peon

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    #11
    one of my clients sites is having the same problem (www.heathdiesel.com). it wiped the titles & descriptions after a site-wide change of the titles about 2 weeks ago. its slowly now going through and pages are now showing up. i think its taking a long time because the site is only pagerank 4 with a very small amount of backlinks.

    -Dan
     
    arestia, Aug 6, 2004 IP