Last month one of my clients lost their ranking for a very important keyword in Google.  They had consistently ranked in the top 10 of Google for “welding positioners” for a few years, then out of the blue one day *poof* – they disappeared. I dug a little deeper and found they were still ranked at #28 for an interior page of the site. It was their home page ranking that had disappeared.

I did a search for the company name and found something odd.  Google was not displaying the words in their title tag. Instead, they were only displaying the company name.  After a little research, I found a thread at WebmasterWorld from someone who had the same problem.  Occasionally Google will display the title from the Open Directory Project (OPD) instead of the one within the code of the site. I’ve come across this problem with Yahoo before, but never Google.  The solution to the problem was simple, just add this small bit of code within the header -

I added the code and it took just over a week for Google to re-index the page. The title was back!  But the ranking was still not back.  I waited another week and half and checked again and there it was! Their ranking was restored. I can’t say 100% for certain that this tag restored their rankings; it could just be a coincidence. But since it only takes a few minutes to do, I highly recommend trying it if you come across the same problem and see if it works for you.

Share This

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, General, Google & Other Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.