Key Moments in episode 168 of the Daily Brand SERP series:
00:00 The Brand SERP for Nora Roberts
00:12 Can you spot what’s missing on her site?
00:28 Nora Roberts’ does not let Google access her website!
00:39 Her groovy own website with lots of her work
00:59 Why will not Nora Roberts let Google access her website?
01:29 Practical Tip: Fix the problem by allowing Google to access your own website! ????
The grooviest advantage of having a personal website is the opportunity to own top spot on your Brand SERP. That means you provide the information Google shows about you, straight from the horse’s mouth (as we colloquially say).
Here, Nora Roberts owns a personal website that can be found at the top of her Brand SERP. Her name serves as the meta title but what’s intriguing is the description, Google says no information is available for this page!
I open the website to investigate and I discovers that Nora Roberts has a well-managed website and has done a lot of work on it. But the reason Google can’t pull up some groovy information from her website is because Nora Roberts actually forbids Google from crawling it!
It’s fascinating that Google is still showing her website at the top despite this. But this situation probably won’t last long. Ideally, Nora Roberts will fix this issue and allow Google to extract and display information about her from her own website.
Watch until the end.
Kalicube’s #DailyBrandSERP December 23rd 2021 presented by the Brand SERP Guy, Jason Barnard
Transcript:
Hi and welcome, I’m Jason Barnard. I’m the Brand SERP Guy and today, we’re looking at the Brand SERP for Nora Roberts, who is an American author, according to Google’s Knowledge Panel about her.
Now today, we’re going to focus on the left-hand side, right at the top, her website noraroberts.com. Google has put it right at the top, but it’s only using her name for the title and no information is available for the page for it to make this snippet.
To learn why, we click on that, then it says actually she wouldn’t let Google into the site to see the content that she might want to present to her audience when they search her name.
Now let’s investigate a little bit. We see here, she’s got pretty good site. She’s obviously spent a lot of time, a lot of resources with all the books. This is obviously a great site for her fans, where they can find out about her books and explore more about her and even shop. So this site is important for her, but she’s made the mistake, if we look here of disallow in the robot.txt.
Now that sounds quite geeky, but it simply means that she has said to Google, you are not allowed to come into this site to see what’s inside. And that leaves Google with only the choice of showing her name as the Bluelink because it knows it’s her site, so it can show her name representing that site, even though it can’t see the content of that site to find a better title potentially.
So one small error in one small part of a site is disallowing, Google from visiting the site, let alone indexing it and leaving it with nothing more to say than Nora Roberts and no information. Her fans, her audience don’t get her message from her. In fact, they don’t get any real message at all, which is a real petty.
This is a mistake with disallow that happens reasonably often. It’s quite surprising that Google is keeping her site at the top, despite that problem. It might well not do so for very much longer.
Thank you very much and I’ll see you soon.
