Google Wont Update Page Title

[Ingie]

I had an article that I was trying to publish that Google refused to index for some reason. Fetched it multiple times, nothing. Created test articles to make sure it wasn't a site issue and they indexed within minutes.

For some reason, Google did not want to index this article.

So I decided to take that article and add it into an existing article that was related.

Added the content in & changed the article title of the existing post & fetched with google.

The content was indexed (can see it in the meta description snippet) but now the old title is gone but the new title isn't their either. The url is now the page title & it won't update in the search results. Purged the cache, fetched it multiple of times, the page source code has the new title correct.

Does google take longer to update pre-existing article titles?

[Mike Friedman]

If they have a page title indexed already, then yeah I wouldn't be shocked if it takes a little longer for them to switch it to a new one.

The situation sounds pretty odd though.

[Ingie]

Yea, I still am at a loss on why the article would not index.

If for some reason this title doesn’t get swapped over I plan to deindex the article and Resubmit the new combined article under a fresh page & pray Google will index it. 

 

 

 

[Ingie]

11 hours ago, Mike Friedman said:

If they have a page title indexed already, then yeah I wouldn't be shocked if it takes a little longer for them to switch it to a new one.

The situation sounds pretty odd though.

Finally got it figured out why Google wouldn't index the brand new article & also why it wouldn't update the existing article to the title I wanted.

I ended up deindexing the combined article where the title wouldn't change and submit reindexing the new combined article after multiple failed tries until I figured out where the issue was.

Google did not want any variation of the word "buy" in the title.

Tried "Best Place to Buy" "Where To Buy" and everything else you can think of and nothing.

Finally tried something completely off from intent to sell/buy for the title & it indexed within 30 seconds with the correct title.

The red flag that helped me figure this out was when I combined the two articles. The content indexed without issues so that wasn't the problem. Yet, Google refused to use my title.

 

[Mike Friedman]

That is really weird. Not sure why Google would care about the word buy or sell.

[Kennethwence]

It's either intentional or Google just had a fail-safe glitch.