301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??

[thephoenix25]

Hi,

This is a new one to me ?!

I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site.  Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages.  The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages.

Is this normal?  If so, how should I prevent this from happening?  What is going on?

The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s?

I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet)

Any help would be appreciated.

Kind Regards

Tony

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Tony,

How long has it been since you did a 301. Normally, it would take 3 to 5 weeks for the new changes to reflect in the SERPS.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[thephoenix25]

Hi Devanur,

I did the redirects Friday, so it seems odd that it has made a difference so soon.  On looking at it further I found that all pages that had a redirect added last Friday have the wrong title in googles serp whilst the pages that didn't get redirected to remain unchanged??

I am confident all the page titles were correct before I did the redirect.

The titles that have been attributed to my current pages are from old pages that were removed in October??

I'm wondering if google got mixed up when crawling my site.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Don't worry my friend. Its been just 3 days. Wait for sometime and check for the issue. You should be doing good. There is one more thing in here. Google does not always show the same title in the SERPs that you specified on your website. It can pick anything that it feels relevant for the page. The possible places to pick would be, content of the page, your site's DMOZ listing and also the title can differ depending on the search term.

For more about this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webmasters/uuLNmyB0AlY

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[thephoenix25]

Hi Devanur,

This was indeed the problem.  Trying different keywords resulted in different title texts.

Nothing to do with the 301s after all.

Thanks for your help.

Tony

[Devanur-Rafi]

Yes my friend. It happens with Google as they are trying hard and working towards their ultimate goal that is as follows:

"We would like to give the user what he wants and not what he types in the search bar"

So all that one can do is to just stick to the best practices, put in diligent and sincere efforts to make our websites provide a good if not the best user experience. I would also like to suggest you that if you can make the title, description and the content go hand-in-hand tightly, then you will not have to worry about Google picking up a title on its own. Yet, no one can guarantee even if you do so will make Google will pick-up the meta information that you mentioned.