Highjacked Google title

[htown]

I have a client who is a website for quite some time and when you Google the name of her company she comes up in the number one spot. However, the title of the Google search is some watch company or Russian crap but the link is valid and does take you to her website. My question is how I get rid of this Russian crap? anyone have any ideas about this?

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Many thanks,
Houston

[Stevie D]

I have a client who is a website for quite some time and when you Google the name of her company she comes up in the number one spot. However, the title of the Google search is some watch company or Russian crap but the link is valid and does take you to her website. My question is how I get rid of this Russian crap? anyone have any ideas about this?

Very strange. I don't know, but have you looked into whether there's any option for dealing with this in Google Webmaster Tools? Otherwise I would suggest reporting it to Google themselves. Although the problem isn't limited to Google. In Yahoo! and Bing the page title comes up as "Buy cheapest Plavix :: 50% off Best Online Drugstore". I wonder if one of those many Javascript files is responsible – always a potential risk when you take on other people's code.

[stdesign]

There is this option in google webmaster tools as I have a similar problem: (

[Mikl]

Here's what Google says about how it displays page titles:

Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's query.

Source

The bit about "references to it that appear on the web" suggests that you might have "crappy Russian" links from another site, although it would be surprising if Google gave that priority over your actual titles.

At the very least, have you checked that the site has got proper high-quality title tags in all its pages? That would be my first step in resolving this issue.

You should also read the full article that I quoted from above, as that has other tips that might be useful.

Mike

[squadron]

I suspect that that page has been hacked. Have a look in the page source code and see if you can find the Russian words, the words that you see in the title of the search results.

[htown]

I am developer and know very little about website marketing. I have a client that is having a very strange strange thing happening when you search for the name of their company, "Round Tree landscaping". See attachment below. How in the world is this happening? It is the same on Bing and Yahoo but different on Google. I did a search on the code for that page and there are no metatags or title tags that have any wording like this. I need to prevent this some how.

Untitled-2.jpg

Many thanks,
Houston

[TechnoBear]

Off Topic:

Threads merged to avoid confusion or repeating the same discussion.

[PicnicTutorials]

Overwrite all the files in the server. And change the passwords. Now make sure none of those files or words live on your local files

[Mikl]

Htown,

I see you got an answer in another forum, in which someone stated that it was because the site in question is built on Joomla, and that a hacker has exploited a Joomla security hole.

For the benefit of anyone else seeing the same problem, have you managed to follow up that answer yet?

Mike