I’ve spent today carrying out a website assessment for a Technology @ Work client for the National B2B Centre. When reviewing how the site appears in the search engines, to my surprise the page titles in the SERPS results all showed additional words prefixing the title that had been set in the page code. A bit baffled by this, time to search for the reason.
The site is a typical website and all page titles we’re identical across the whole website and this could be seen by viewing in the site in Yahoo and also Bing. From an Search Engine Optimisation perspective extremely bad as by now we all know that Page Titles should be unique for every page and provide an understanding of what the page talks about.
So after searching Google for the answer I came across this article explaining the answer:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264
Google will look at the page title and the content and if the two don’t happen to match it will create it’s own page title…… (well adding the menu click text to the page title to give it some level of uniqueness)
The article goes on to once again get the user to create a relevant page title along with a good description for the page – ensuring that Google has all it needs to display the correct content to the user.
