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Has anyone encountered Google inserting digits at the beginning of page titles in…
Has anyone encountered Google inserting digits at the beginning of page titles in SERPs, and if so any ideas why?
It's a news site, so one thought came to m,y mind that perhaps it was updates to the story, but also saw cases where what looks like a timestamp is prepended to the page title.
Odd thing is that a site: combined with intitle:[N] wont return any of these pages, but they can be seen via regular searches.
Any ideas?
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Example queries?
Regarding not being able to find them with advanced operators, they work on indexed content – title rewriting affects what is displayed but not what is indexed – perhaps this might explain some of it?
Comment by Alistair Lattimore — October 20, 2014 @ 10:33 am
Yep that's what made things so odd – it gave a strong indication that what Google is showing was coming from them rather than the target site.
Here's an example SERP, which hopefully will show you a result with a digit "5" at head of title:
https://www.google.ie/search?q=scotland+referendum+tournout+highest+since+universal+site:www.irishtimes.com
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 20, 2014 @ 10:53 am
And just for fun I found another one from a blog site, except this time it's a numeral then a hyphen, followed by the page title.
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 20, 2014 @ 12:00 pm
I wonder if some wires have been crossed with an attempt to bring link title text in. I see the same result on the SERP with the "5" at the start, and looking at the Irish Times site, I wonder if google picked this up from their "Most Read" panel.
Looking at the markup there, they have the story number included as part of the href, alongside the title. So perhaps they picked this story up originally when it was number 5 on that list, and the link text stuck?
Comment by Paul Conroy — October 20, 2014 @ 12:00 pm
Good spot – that could indeed be it. I hadn't thought about links to the page.
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 20, 2014 @ 12:02 pm
Fairly sure this is it +Paul Conroy. They also list some titles with timestamps, which come from the latest articles widget.
Great spot – well done!
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 20, 2014 @ 12:06 pm
Could it be a social number, by coincidence there are 4 social shares for the buttons on the page – maybe Google has checked the count at a few additional sources and there is a fifth one floating around somewhere?
Comment by Alistair Lattimore — October 20, 2014 @ 2:31 pm
Likely answer is above Alistair. Links in most read widget include a digit. Titles also sometimes had a timestamp also, so Google was generating titles from anchor text.
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 20, 2014 @ 2:45 pm