Google’s John Mueller answered a question about Google rewriting title tags to display the old branding of a site that changed its name in 2015. Apparently everything has been updated with the new brand name, but Google’s search results stubbornly persist in showing the old branding.
Old brand name displayed in title tags
The person who asked the question on Bluesky said that a company updated their entire site with their new branding, but Google ignores it in favor of showing the old branding in search results.
They job:
“Hey @johnmu.com, curious about the persistence of the site name. Treatwell (UK) still appears as “Wahanda” in the results – a name change that took place in 2015! Is there a specific “legacy” signal that could override the current SiteName structured data for such a long period of time in a single country?”
Google’s Mueller was perplexed by the situation and had no answer as to why this was happening. This may be one of those rare cases where a bug prevents part of the index from being updated. But he suggested using the domain name as an alternative site name.
Mueller referred the person to one of Google’s developer pages: “What to do if your preferred site name is not selected.”
He replied:
“This is a bit strange – I’ll pass it along to the team. FWIW, what usually works in cases like this is to use the domain name as an alternate site name – developers.google.com/search/docs/… – but it would be nice if that wasn’t necessary.”
The site itself does not appear to contain any instances of the malicious branding page. The old domain correctly redirects 301 to the new domain. However, some links in the footer contain referral codes bearing the old branding, and the sitemap contains links to 404 pages containing the old branding. While this is not the cause of brand mismatch in Google search results, it is a good SEO practice to pay attention to the content of your sitemaps and remove outdated links.
These types of rare errors are interesting because they sort of provide insight into a part of Google’s indexing that isn’t normally visible, like a crack in a wall. What lessons do you learn from this abnormal situation?
Featured image by Shutterstock/SsCreativeStudio
