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CANONICAL CHRONICLE

Episode 6 - How do I stop Google rewriting my title tags - Answered!

In this video

In this week's episode of Canonical Chronicle, our weekly roundup of all things search, we discuss:

  • Google understanding English queries in non-English sites

  • If semantic markup highlighting content of a page makes a difference

  • Can we stop Google rewriting our titles? Why do you do that?

  • And much, much more...

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I’m Ross Tavendale, the managing director of Type A Media, a creative search agency based in London. I make videos about business leadership, web technology, SEO, PPC and how I turned being a Type A personality into a business.

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Video summary

Can Google understand English Queries in non english website?

Yes!

Google understands the language differences but it recommends that you have a primary language on the page.

Does Google take longer to redirects noindex pages?

Yes

Noindex is a signal that tells Google to remove things from the index so it gets a reduced crawl rate. So it will take longer for the redirects to work and get processed.

Do image sitemaps resolve all SEO issues around images using lazy load?

No.

They attach the content to the page but don’t provide context to the image so the preferred method is to add an image to a noscript element below the lazy load itself. Remember alt attributes, captions and text around the image to give Google context. 

Why can’t I submit my URL via the submit URL form anymore?

It’s been removed due to it being 2018. If you try and fax or mail or telegram in a list of your links that will also no longer work.

Does semantic markup highlighting content of a page make a difference?

Yes.

Surprisingly John confirmed bold, highlighted and italicized text give Google extra information about the page. John says not to worry about the way in which you do it, Google will look at the text and see that the bold text is particularly important.

Can we stop Google rewriting our titles? Why do you do that?

No.

Google has algorithms that rewrite the titles of your site if they think the title is not suitable or not clear. For example, keyword stuffed or super long titles will be rewritten.

Any tips for making a site in Angular 5?

Don’t do it. Kill it with fire.

Just kidding. John said that it's important to remember how Google renders javascript pages. Remember they use chrome 41 to render pages

Use the mobile friendly test or fetch and render

Just remember they dont process ES6 code so they won't be able to process that. It needs to be written in ES5.

Our mobile site doesn't have as many categories or internal links as the desktop - is it possible we will lose some rankings when we switch to mobile first indexing?

Yes. Hell yes.

Try and make the experiences as similar as possible. Google use links to find pages and understand importance. So they need to be there

Can I use HREF LANG on a CCTLD to geo target other countries?

Noooo.

If it’s on .co.uk or .ca then the content is getting served to the UK or Canada. If you use hreflang to specify another country with href lang they don't change the rankings they just switch out the URLs for the most relevant versions.