how to get title and description in Google organic search results
April 22, 2008 8:48 AM Subscribe

What am I doing wrong in my HTML that the description in Google's organic search just says "Untitled Document?"

Check out the HTML for our photography site by going to View:Source at www.vantagephotography.com. I can't copy and paste the HTML here - it doesn't appear. The page has a title that shows in the title bar, and a meta description. When I find it in organic search results in Google (#1 when you search for "vantage photography") it just says "Untitled Document" with no description. Our other site - www.weddingsbyvantage.com - has the same problem. Help! What are we doing wrong? It should have been indexed and cached many times by this point.

posted by mamessner to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Untitled Document is the title of your page. Put something else between the title tags, and it should work fine.
posted by kidbritish at 8:49 AM on April 22

Before you are redirected to the home page, /main/home.php, you are on the /main page. This page has the title "Untitled Document". The Google crawler is not redirected to your real home page. To help with search engines, you should alter your URL scheme so that the home page is just http://vantagephotography.com/ without any redirection.
posted by matthewr at 8:52 AM on April 22

It seems like you have index.php pages that resolve to www.weddingsbyvantage.com and www.vantagephotography.com - those index pages flash on my monitor for a split second if I type in, for example, www.vantagephotography.com/index.php, and I can see where it says Untitled Document in the left top of my browser window bar. You need to go to your index pages and give them titles. I'm probably not explaining this correctly, as I am no html whiz. But hopefully you understand what I mean.
posted by iconomy at 8:58 AM on April 22

This is the very top of your HTML file.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

<title>Untitled Document</title>

<style type="text/css">

Replace the text between the <title></title> tags with whatever you want the title to be, then save, upload, and replace the file.
posted by carsonb at 10:17 AM on April 22

What everone else said: Untitled Document is the title of the page before you redirect. Change that or eliminate the redirect.
posted by Artw at 10:28 AM on April 22

...and the reason why you've got that one-page-redirecting-to-another setup is because you're using Flash.

The first page detects whether or not my browser has got Flash: it redirects to the second if I pass that test.

This is just one more reason why people hate Flash.

Come to think of it, there are two redirects, aren't there? Top level to main/index.whatever, then another one to /main/home.php

Who developed the site, by the way? And why aren't you asking them this question?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 9:35 PM on April 22

Google dislikes redirects a LOT, even if they are benign (like Flash redirects).

People dislike Flash intros, so it's a great idea to drop them. Flash websites, unless coded very properly by well-versed designers, do not index well (or at all) in Google and other engines.

(this is not a flash-bash, as it IS possible, as I alluded, to get a flash site to rank and get the content indexed, but it's an advanced skillset, not one normally seen in so-called Flash design shops).

Might be too late for you, but you should really consider the supposed value of an all-flash site versus being found and playing well with the search engines.

Put your photos in a Flash album if you wish (images don't get indexed for content), and put the rest in a well designed, HTML/CSS website.

You'll get a far higher return on investment over time from your (now indexable) website.
posted by MTCreations at 10:13 AM on April 30

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how to get title and description in Google organic search results April 22, 2008 8:48 AM Subscribe

how to get title and description in Google organic search results
April 22, 2008 8:48 AM Subscribe