SEO and indexing problem

[Anska]

Hello, I hope someone can help.

I’ve put up my husband’s new website (adriantchaikovsky.com) and originally Google indexed the front page well. Since then, I have changed the front page because one of his books has been nominated for an award but now the new Google indexed title for the first page of his website says, “has been shortlisted for the” which is not helpful at all!
How do I make this different and tell Google what to call the page (I’d prefer it to say “Welcome” or “Home Page” at the very least)
I can see that I can ‘deny’ Google to index the page but I don’t seem to have any control of what that page will be called.
In addition, his website seems to have lost its position on Google as well (probably as a result of this weird indexing?)

Can you help?

Many thanks
Annie

[duncan]

Hi @Anska,

it appears that Google has a cached version of your website, if you click on the three dots and then on “cached” you can see what they’re seeing.

Specifically that page had a title of just “Home” (something Sparkle’s SEO Assistant will expressly mention you should change), and it’s one of the cases where Google will replace the title with something else they think is significant, as per this article:

More information on how Google generates titles for web page results...

Your current title, “Adrian Tchaikovsky, science fiction and fantasy author” is much better, but Google hasn’t indexed your site again, and there really isn’t much control over that. It could take days or weeks. Once they do, that’s what the search result will show.

The position in Google is constantly in flux as they change their algorithms, it’s not easy to comment on that because “losing position” implies some query you care about, and involves other websites linking to your domain (with the search terms you are using) and other things like domain reputation.

Having the newer title will likely also help the search for “Adrian Tchaikovsky”, and again following the suggestions of the SEO Assistant I suggest you set the title text to Title style.

For the full set of suggestions do this in the home page settings and run the SEO Assistant: