Funny Search Result Titles in Google

[Deleted User] · April 9, 2017

Hi everybody!
I just realized, that Google gives me more and more funny search result titles. If you google for: "site:www.berndhartenberger.com" you will see, that many title of my pages are like "gallery name - Action" instead of "gallery name - Bernd Hartenberger". This means, that my website name "Bernd Hartenberger" is not included any more. Something is wrong. Does anyone else have that problem?
Cheers!
Bernd

denisegoldberg · April 9, 2017

I am seeing the same thing with my site on both keywords and galleries. I haven't yet seen a pattern in the cases where the word "Action" is used instead of my site name. This definitely doesn't seem right.

leftquark · April 9, 2017

Something looks a little off -- I'll see what I can find from the Engineering team as soon as possible.

leftquark · April 9, 2017

I checked Bing and search results are as expected, with your site name as part of the search result. It looks like Google is doing something where they're combining different title fields and ignoring the <title> tag that we give in the HTML (which is usually - ). We're digging into this further...

leftquark · April 9, 2017

Per Google, they will often often take additional context from pages to determine what title to display in search results. The issue with pulling the phrase "action" only appears when doing a site: search and does not impact actual search results. On googles normal search results, for example "aaron Meyers photography landscapes" the search titles are as expected. If this issue pops up on those normal search results we'll continue to investigate but for now it looks like google is doing something different on site: queries

Hikin' Mike · April 9, 2017

@leftquark said:
Per Google, they will often often take additional context from pages to determine what title to display in search results. The issue with pulling the phrase "action" only appears when doing a site: search and does not impact actual search results. On googles normal search results, for example "aaron Meyers photography landscapes" the search titles are as expected. If this issue pops up on those normal search results we'll continue to investigate but for now it looks like google is doing something different on site: queries

Looking at the source code of the cached version. Looks like they (Google) are inserting (among other things) this after the <body> tag using site::

    <symbol fill="currentColor" viewBox="0 0 18 18" id="sm-icon-def-small-Action"><title>Action</title>

I checked my last night too and it's only when you do the site:.

leftquark · April 10, 2017

Yep -- we're slowly moving all our icons over to using SVG's instead of the SmugMug font icons. It's better practice, improves load times on your sites, and will enable more usable icons in the future. And it's best practice to include the title of the SVG as part of the markup.

Still not sure why Google does that with the site: search but unfortunately Google is a big black box.

Hikin' Mike · April 10, 2017

@leftquark said:
Yep -- we're slowly moving all our icons over to using SVG's instead of the SmugMug font icons. It's better practice, improves load times on your sites, and will enable more usable icons in the future. And it's best practice to include the title of the SVG as part of the markup.

Still not sure why Google does that with the site: search but unfortunately Google is a big black box.

Are they going to use FontAwesome? That would be nice. This way I don't have to load it to display it on my SM site.

leftquark · April 11, 2017

I'm not sure if I follow ... the SVG icons would be stored on SmugMug just like other image assets that smugmug uses.

Hikin' Mike · April 11, 2017

@leftquark said:
I'm not sure if I follow ... the SVG icons would be stored on SmugMug just like other image assets that smugmug uses.

I knew that. I wasn't thinking (again).

leftquark · April 12, 2017

We've pushed a change that should hopefully resolve the issue with Google putting "Action" into the titles of peoples search results. It will take Google a little bit of time to refresh the site titles but they should start dropping out.

It appears that Google is doing something very odd and because they're a big black box, we're not sure why they're doing what they're doing. We were following best practices for accessibility around images/icons and had not changed anything that would cause them to start naming the titles with "Action" in them. We're reaching out to Google to see if we can get some answers but as SmugMug site owners, you should be all set!

Djm3006 · April 14, 2017

thanks for the info

Djm3006 · April 21, 2017

Has anyone seen any change in the "Action" issue going on in google search ??

[Deleted User] · April 21, 2017

@Djm3006: I am sure, it will take at least a month until you can see any changes in google's search results. You should enjoy some cups of tea meanwhile. ;-)

leftquark · April 22, 2017

We tested with a few sites y going into your Google search manager and asking Google to reindex the site. Action disappeared a few days later

Djm3006 · April 22, 2017

Looks like Google did their stuff overnight

Funny Search Result Titles in Google

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