Google using navigation’s HTML for page titles in SERP

zombies-serp

While reviewing the Zombie Industries site, we noticed that some of their page titles weren’t being accurately reflected in Google’s SERPs. Google was prepending the title with what appeared to be a related term for an unknown reason. After a bit of digging, here’s what we learned.

First, here’s exactly what we were seeing in Google’s SERPs for their Zombie Targets page:

Actual page title: Zombie Targets – Tactical Bleeding Zombie Targets
In the SERPs: BLEEDINGZombie Targets – Tactical Bleeding Zombie Targets

Digging through the page’s source, there was nothing in the meta that included the “BLEEDING” string. Searching a bit more, the site’s sub-navigation does include “BLEEDING”. The markup looked like this:

<span>BLEEDING</span>Zombie Targets

Quite interesting, looks like Google’s using the navigation to include additional information in the title. But we don’t want that, so with a couple of CSS & HTML tweaks, the new markup becomes:

<span>Bleeding</span><br />Zombie Targets

After the change, Google stopped prepending the “Bleeding” string. We’ve only seen this happen on the Zombie’s site. We’ll keep this post updated with more information as we see it.

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