URL is Indexed but No Title or Description, Why?


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Forum Index · Search Engine Forums · Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines · MSN Search Engine · URL is Indexed but No Title or Description, Why?

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Zinger Joined: Mar 04, 2001 # Posts: 293	Posted: 10/20/2005 09:31 pm Hi All, I'm not sure why but for the homepage of a site I am working on only the URL is listed at MSN - there is no title of description. Do a search at MSN for 'ttnet' and you will see the site listed at #1. Google and Yahoo! don't have a problem displaying the title. Does anyone know what the problem is? The site is using javascript includes for some of it's content and some javascript links but I have made sure there is indexable content that both Google and Yahoo have recognized without a problem. There are plenty of incoming links and the site has a Google PR6. Unfortunately the owner won't make changes to the site regarding the javascript navigation so I need to workaround that. I've been waiting a bit of time to see if it was just a glitch but nothing has changed. Can anyone help? Cheers (Copy Shortcut)

g1smd Moderator Joined: Jul 28, 2002 # Posts: 10178 Website	Posted: 10/21/2005 03:00 am Search engines don't follow Javascript. You need a sitemap to get round this, but you should really fix the main navigation instead. I don't understand why you would use "JavaScript Includes" as these will fail on some browsers, and fail with all search engines. Perhaps look into SSI and PHP and get the server to do the including into the page before it is sent out from the server. (Copy Shortcut)

Zinger Joined: Mar 04, 2001 # Posts: 293	Posted: 10/21/2005 03:07 am thanks for the tips, I have managed to persuade the owners to use some SSI but it is slow progress given the size of their site and company. I would really like to know what is preventing MSN from recognizing the title tag though and other spiderable content the other search engines are indexing - any ideas? Thanks (Copy Shortcut)

g1smd Moderator Joined: Jul 28, 2002 # Posts: 10178 Website	Posted: 10/21/2005 03:25 am Run the pages through http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html first. I would assume that some HTML coding error is tripping the bots up. Check the site internal linking using Xenu LinkSleuth too, and be prepared for it to tell you that you have hundreds of hours of work to do. (Copy Shortcut)

jsrobinson Joined: Dec 18, 2004 # Posts: 29	Posted: 10/28/2005 12:22 am g1smd: "I don't understand why you would use "JavaScript Includes" as these will fail on some browsers, and fail with all search engines." I may have missed something here, but looking at the site, the includes are properly used, in that most of the jscript functionality in the includes are meant for newer browsers and not search engines. The meta description tags and other HTML identifiers are not being driven by the javascript, so it shouldn't make any difference. My rule of thumb: if it is display code or form handlers, it belongs in an include. Having it in an include file also has the benefit of download-once caching, much like CSS, so huge libraries for drop-down/menu navigation doesn't have to be transfered between the server and browser on ever page request. As to why the description is not being displayed properly, my next course of action would be to wrap the first piece of body text in <Hx> tags. (Copy Shortcut)

g1smd Moderator Joined: Jul 28, 2002 # Posts: 10178 Website	Posted: 10/28/2005 03:16 am >> wrap the first piece of body text in <Hx> tags. << Correct usage would be to have a heading that introduces the body text... (Copy Shortcut)

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