Comments on: Has anyone encountered Google inserting digits at the beginning of page titles in…

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:45:40 +0000

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.

By: Alistair Lattimore

Alistair Lattimore — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:31:45 +0000

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?

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:06:23 +0000

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!

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:02:27 +0000

Good spot – that could indeed be it. I hadn't thought about links to the page.

By: Paul Conroy

Paul Conroy — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:00:41 +0000

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?

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:00:20 +0000

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.

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 09:53:29 +0000

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

By: Alistair Lattimore

Alistair Lattimore — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 09:33:23 +0000

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?