Brand Name Pulling Into Search Results Incorrectly

[TriMarkDigital]

Hi Moz Community!

I have a client, Acme Stove Co., whose branded search results are pulling in the wrong name. A Google search for "Acme Stove Co" returns pages with the title "Acme Stove & Video." Really not sure where this "& Video" part is pulling from - there is no mention of videos on the pages that are ranking with these terms, and Google is definitely using a title tag other than the one that we have worked to optimize. It appears to be happening on the homepage and our store location pages. Screen shot of search results is attached.

The company definitely does not offer any sort of video services whatsoever, so we're really stumped as to where this may be coming from.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!!

8bNOWeF.png

[GPainter]

Very Strange indeed META NOODP tag? It can help if Google decided it likes DMOZ more though you don't seem to have a link but its handy. You can also implement some Rich snippets  - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en to help Google know e.g the name of your site etc.

Hope that helps sorry i couldn't get to the bottom though another clever person here might be able to.

Good luck

[KevinBudzynski]

Don't know if this helps or not. Acme Video Fireplaces & Stove is/was a real place and was located in Harrisburg, VA.

Sometimes Google will rewrite or add the brand to your url and in this case, it changed your title tag w/this brand. How to fix it? I'm guessing you will need to increase your use of brand signals until Google catches on.

[Dr-Pete]

It's definitely odd. I am seeing some evidence of bad data in DMOZ:

http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=acme+stove

...so I'd definitely try Meta NOODP (). Sometimes, it can shake that stuff loose.

What's weird, though, is that Google is crossing that same bad title into your listing on other sites. For example running an exact match search for ("acme stove & video") and Google is putting that title on the BBB listings, even though it doesn't appear on those pages either. It is possibly that it's bleeding over from a bad local listing or something in the Knowledge Base, but that won't usually impact title tag rewrites.

Your home-page title tag is a bit keyword-heavy, which doesn't help. It's basically:

"Product Location | Product & Product Location"

...and doesn't even mention your brand. Unfortunately, that reads a little spammy, and that makes Google more inclined to do a rewrite. I'd personally tone it down a bit and get the brand in there.

[GPainter]

I saw the BBB and noticed it does mention it but couldn't figure if it was any real cause -

http://imgur.com/QaZ0G50

[TriMarkDigital]

Thank you, everyone, SO much for your responses! We did see that BBB listing and were able to contact them and have the name of the business changed to the correct one. We will definitely try the Meta NOODP tag and re-work the homepage title tag and meta description and see if that helps. The weirdest part is that this just started happening recently - our search results didn't used to look like that.

We'll keep working on it. Thank you again, everybody!

[Dr-Pete]

My gut feeling is that Google is doing the same thing to the BBB entry (re-writing, that is) and not that BBB is the cause, but it's a little hard to separate.