MixUp at Google? URLs and Page Titles Being Mixed Up

Apr 11, 2008 | 2,754 views | by Navneet Kaushal
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

It seems like Google is facing difficulties in mapping URLs and the pages associated to those URLs. According to Webmaster World , titles and URLs from the same domain are being mixed up in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

It has also been observed that in many searches the requested pages are not being shown, but some other page is being displayed with the title of the requested direct search. Which means that the title shown and the page displayed are two totally different entities and neither matches the page that the user has searched for.

For example:

“ if you request this:

site:www.example.com/subportal1/

you get results from /subportal2/ and the titles are mashed up with results from /subportal3/ “

“I am seeing odd stuff going on at the moment. A search like:

site:domain.com "some text to find"

is also returning several pages that are NOT from domain.com in the results.

The change has happened in the last 24 to 36 hours, or less.”

This sort of an anomaly is making it much more difficult for non-specific searches. I mean, when Google isn't able to produce target specific results, how can we hope to find something that would be hard to find in the first place.

Recommend this story

Navneet Kaushal

About the author:

Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others. Follow Navneet Kaushal on Google +.

Related Articles

  • No Related Post

{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

John Jones April 11, 2008 at 12:47

Now this might just be my office computer but lately when conducting searches on Google I am not getting the indented tabs. This started yesterday morning for me and only seems to happen on IE6 and on this computer only. I’ve had a few co-workers take a look and have also repeated the search at home on both my tower and laptop with no repeat of this problem.

It sure is amazing how much I first despised the indents and now have come to suffer without them. I do hope that this doesn’t become the norm and that it is my computer but has anyone else noticed this as well?

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Reply

Good Tidings Nautical Gifts April 11, 2008 at 15:01

It gets very frustrating indeed when I am trying to rank under term Nautical gifts and another site has it’s main page and one or two sub domain pages hogging that sacred top 10. This has happened more in the last few weeks.

Reply

David Webb April 11, 2008 at 15:27

My website Alternative4u on google is headed quagmire if you just type Alternative4u in the google search bar, it has been headed like that for 3 months now, so this problem is far from new.
I wrote & phoned google and they have no idea why it has happened, as till Jan if was headed Alternative Health Care when anyone typed Alternative4u.
bye
David Webb

Reply

John Jones April 11, 2008 at 15:34

I got a genius idea today almost immediately after I hit submit on this blog today. I decided to clear my cache, cookies and all that good stuff and guess what… indented tabs came back. Whoops; I’m allowed a slip up once or twice right?

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Reply

Yiwu April 11, 2008 at 19:33

yep,good post, sometimes I find Google cant return the right results..

Reply

Burn The Fat With Rika Susan April 11, 2008 at 22:46

Thanks for highlighting this issue. I have been experiencing this frustrating situation for about two months.

One of my sites http://www.Activity-Sports-Fitness.com lost almost all its listings overnight. With the remaining listings, completely off-topic pages come up when you do a search – even where I do have pages with the exact keyword phrase.

I don’t know what to do to get this straightened out again. How on earth do I bring this to Google’s attention? Do they even know about this problem? I am still fully indexed, so at least that is OK. I don’t have any black hat stuff on my site – just good old original content written by myself.

Reply

David Webb April 12, 2008 at 00:11

I see I am not the only person who has a problem with this search engine. I have never been convinced why that engine is seen as good myself, it is quite bland, has no nice content on it, you do not need to have google load in your web browser when you put the PC on, I have since google has messed up put Altervista in my PCs and 1000s of other folk have done the same, because we all want better results that google can give us.
Also google wont except most webpages anyway, 70% of web pages wont be listed in google, if you dont think this is gtrue, build a web page, try to submit it to all search engines once made. The only one that wont except your website is google, as they have an odd way of html results, and most pages made wont have that type in them.
I have 20 live websites on net, and none are in google if a domain name is used, only if you use the full url of site not domain will you get listed.

Reply

Marah Marie April 12, 2008 at 19:47

Is this some sort of joke that I’m not in on yet? When I go directly to Google.com in Firefox I’m brought to a page that says “Welcome 1062b7c37601fe2d You can’t turn me off!” The first time I saw it it said all that but instead of “You can’t turn me off!” it said “How may we help you?” I guess because it was my first time visiting. I have screen shots to prove it, and I can’t find anything in Google about it except your page here, which doesn’t seem directly related to my problem (but you never know). Also, the words being displayed under Google’s title are actually an image since I can’t select them with my mouse, and they change dynamically with each page refresh, it looks like. Have I fatally infected the computer with something (wouldn’t be the first time – but it would only be the second!) or is Google up to something – or maybe they are getting hacked?

Reply

Marah Marie April 12, 2008 at 20:00

As soon as I wrote the above I said something about it and someone in my house began howling with laughter so I asked him what was so funny and he told me he put an add on in Firefox, so false alarm. It actually is pretty funny. He added on HAL (a Greasemonkey script, apparently?) and I had him take it off. Then he told me don’t write this comment, just let everyone think something is up at Google, but I said I couldn’t do that, in all fairness, unless something really was up (I know, I’m so boring). So just never mind. Hopefully he gave you all a little comic relief anyway (and yes I’m going to go kill him now)..

Reply

infrascape April 17, 2008 at 22:26

Good information provided by this blog. many people will learn a lot
Network Monitoring

Reply

Leave a Comment