Distilled stole my page title. Well, indirectly. Well.... keep reading. (Full disclosure: I was recently hired by Distilled to work in the New York City office. This post was written before I was hired.)

One day in early April, I was searching for my personal website using some searches that I knew worked for my site. One of these was my name. I searched "John Doherty" and saw this:

What I saw in the Google SERPs

"Hang on," I said to myself, "that's not my page title."

Sure enough, I looked at the page title and this is what I saw:

The title is different from Google's!

This is also not what I set in my backend (ok ok, make a joke) as the page title using Yoast SEO:

Settings in Yoast SEO

What could it be then?? Why is my page title different when Google pulls up this page for my name?

After looking through my settings and my site, I was dumbfuddled. Then I remembered "Wait, that text looks familiar!" I set to searching through my backlinks, and sure enough, here is what I found, on Distilled's website:

Distilled's Recap by Tom

There it is! "A pretty epic recap from John Doherty". Distilled stole my page title!

Or did they?

Jen Lopez from SEOmoz made a very astute observation in the comments on the post:

Jen's Comment

After a bit of back-and-forth with Jen and others, I decided to unapprove the two trackbacks at the bottom of the post. Sure enough, within some hours the title started to change:

An extra '- The -' appeared
 

It seemed the anchor text from Distilled's site was starting to lose its grip on my title.

Things Get Weird

On Tuesday morning, my friend and another local Philadelphia SEO, Tom Harari, linked to my site from his recap of the New Orleans Linklove Conference. Here is the link:

Tom's Link to my Recap

Sure enough, the next morning (trackbacks were still unapproved at this point), we saw this in the SERPs:

The SERP Changed

Since trackbacks were unapproved, it seems that Tom's link overpowered the Distilled link. The crazy factor here is that Tom's site was put live the day before the link was added.

Distilled's site lost the anchor text to a brand new site!

I should also note that "John Doherty's..." does not show up in any trackbacks, so this text was directly pulled from Tom's site.

Why did this happen? My guess is that Tom's link overpowered the Distilled link because my name was at the beginning of Tom's link. Interesting!

At this point, I had taken a poll of Twitter followers and friends on another post. It was decided by quorum to ask others to add links to the page, using the exact page title, to see if anything would change. Here are the links (and the existing links to that page) that were added thanks to Justin Fried, Florian Karmen, and Julian Berard:

You can clearly see that my site was overweighted on links with my name to the recaps, but not my homepage.

The page title changed the day after the links were added, but it was an unexpected change!

"2 Comments??"

Google decided to show "2 Comments - The Beginner SEO | John Doherty" as my page title. Le sigh.

Why? My guess is that since the trackbacks were not approved, and there were now more links pointing to this page with the exact page title as the anchor text, Google decided to pull something from onsite that they THOUGHT was most relevant (I guess a combination of the anchor texts). Wrong, Google. Very wrong indeed.

As a side note, this occurred when NOODP was enabled for just the page. I plan to do more testing on this meta tag. I encouraged Google to show something different by changing the theme CSS to have "display:none" for those links to the comments section.

How Was it Fixed?

First, I asked my link friends to change their links to say my name and link to my homepage. Eventually, this pushed the result under my About page in the SERPs for my full name, but not for "John Doherty".

Then, once I reapproved the trackbacks from the Distilled post, and turned on the meta NOODP and NOYDIR for the post, the page title came back:

Trackbacks reapproved, with NOODP and NOYDIR on

I did some more testing after this point, turning off and on NOODP/NOYDIR, approving and unapproving comments and trackbacks. The title changed with each change that I did, but nothing brought back the original page title. Even after those who gave me links changed the links to say my name and point to my homepage, the title stayed the same when searching for my name. The page title finally changed in the search results pages when I changed it in my post settings to say "The Distilled #Linklove Conference | John Doherty".

The Final Title

Lessons Learned

I think there are some lessons to be learned here.

1. Balance your link profile. My site was weighted too heavy on deep links and did not have enough links to the homepage with either my name or my site's brand. Scale slowly.
    
2. Watch your online reputation. If I had not been keeping tabs on my name online, and what appeared for in the Google search results, I never would have found this. I was lucky that Distilled was nice to me in their link!
    
3. Watch trackbacks and pingbacks. The trackbacks from the Distilled posts definitely influenced Google when they were trying to give my post the most relevant title.
    
4. Block search engines from changing your content as much as possible. I have implemented NOODP (No Open Directory Project) and NOYDIR (No Yahoo Directory) meta tags to try to prevent the search engines from changing my meta descriptions. I thought initially that NOODP/NOYDIR were changing permissions on a page-level basis, and I still suspect this, but more testing is needed. Dr Pete wrote a great post about NOODP/NOYDIR here back in January.
    
5. To learn about Google's guidelines concerning META descriptions, I recommend reading this page in the Webmaster Support section. The lesson here is: do your homework. For example, I thought that using the microformat "rel=me" would help group my different social accounts together in the SERPs, and possibly help change the page title back. It did neither. I would not have known this without testing.

A Word of Caution

I worry some may try to use this knowledge for less-than-ethical reasons, so let me appeal to you not to do so. I don't think it will work in most cases, unless it is a new site, so if you try to make a competitor's page title say something like "(Brand) Is A Scam", you'll probably just be adding another link to their site.

I would love to hear other ideas about how to reclaim your page title when it has been changed algorithmically by the search engines. A few were given on the original post as well.

*Thank you to the other SEOs who helped me test*

John Doherty is the newest member of Distilled NYC. You can find him on Twitter: @dohertyjf.