Google search results have been showing an “Untitled” title tag for some sites over the past 3 days. People who click on those sites are being sent to spam sites, according to postings from users on Hacker News and Reddit.
‘Untitled’ Google results. Here’s what a Hacker News user posted:
There is speculation in that thread that some of the reports of ‘Untitled’ results are due to compromised WordPress sites.
That thread reference another Hacker News thread, which included additional evidence of the issue in a discussion about Google rewriting page titles:
On Reddit, there is additional discussion of this issue. One user shared what the “Untitled” titles look like:
According to the Hacker News and Reddit threads, the ‘Untitled’ issue could be seen on queries including: [name of a file that exists], [GitLab release], [GitLab Community Edition], [check gitlab version], [laser singapore camera], [UCLA laser singapore], [wordpress transparent images], [LJ corpus], and [present for doctors surgery reddit].
Google’s response. When alerted about the issue and thread via Twitter, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan tweeted: “We’re working on it.”
Sullivan posted on Hacker News that the Google spam team was “already on it. … I think things are already improving and they’ll keep debugging it.”
On Reddit, Sullivan added some additional context: “It’s not malware. It’s spam, something our systems normally would typically catch, so we’re checking on it to improve.”
He also added: “I can’t reproduce that myself, but it still helps understanding you’re seeing it happen on desktop and your phone. We’re looking into it.“
Why we care. Many have questioned the quality of Google’s search results in recent months (to be fair: some SEO professionals have been questioning the quality of Google’s search results for even longer than that!). But spam or malware sites in search results is bad for users, which is bad for Google. While this issue won’t cause most users to abandon Google (where are they going to go?), it’s stuff like this that gives SEO and search a bad name.
