Google shows a wrong website name

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Google shows a wrong website name

doc_z

9:20 am on Sep 13, 2023 (gmt 0)

Recently we have relaunched our website. In the process, many page titles have also changed. Of course, the name of the website, which is also the brand, remained the same. However, Google changed the title to the wrong name - the name of our sister site - after the relaunch. The page titles were also changed from "This is the title | example.com" to "This is the title | example.com | GooglesName.com".

We were able to solve the problem with some changes.

Nevertheless, currently you can see more and more examples of wrong names in the results. Here is a prominent example:

https://www.suchmaschinen-doktor.de/wiktionary.jpg

Naming Wiktionary as Wikipedia is nonsense and misleading!

When will Google stop determining the name of a website? Naming is the choice of the website.

Btw, bing is not better. [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: not2easy at 12:24 pm (utc) on Sep 13, 2023]
[edit reason] corrected image link [/edit]

not2easy

12:52 pm on Sep 13, 2023 (gmt 0)

I would start with validating your html for the site and submitting a fresh sitemap with the GSC account for the site so they can have no excuse. If there are no html errors, (such as Doctype) and if Google and Bing have validated your sites then there should be no confusion on the part of crawlers.

doc_z

1:42 pm on Sep 13, 2023 (gmt 0)

As said, we were able to solve the problem with some changes (for Google). It had nothing todo with HTML or the siemap, it was all about titles.

My point is when Google showing wrong website names it's not only annoying for the website owners but also misleading for the normal user of Google. While I was able to solve the problem for our website, I still seeing misleading names in the SERPs for other sites like Wiktionary.

not2easy

2:44 pm on Sep 18, 2023 (gmt 0)

It took a while to find it, but you can see how to ensure that they show the proper name in this thread from about a year ago: [webmasterworld.com...]

Google had announced a change for mobile serps by adding "Site Name" to your schema markup:

"name" : "Example Company"

Announcement here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/10/introducing-site-names-on-search.

doc_z

5:14 pm on Sep 18, 2023 (gmt 0)

Thank you very much for this tip. This helps to fix problems on your own page.

However, Google should rethink its algorithm. There are many cases - as the Wiktionary example shows - where wrong informations are displayed.