Google’s John Mueller answered a question about Google rewriting title tags to show the old brand of a site that rebranded in 2015. Apparently everything was updated to the new brand name, but Google’s search results stubbornly persist in showing the old branding.
Old Brand Name Shown In Title Tags
The person asking the question on Bluesky related that a company updated their entire site with its new branding, but Google ignores it in favor of showing the old branding in the search results.
They posted:
“Hey @johnmu.com, curious about Site Name persistence. Treatwell (UK) is still showing as “Wahanda” in results – a rebrand that happened in 2015! Is there a specific “legacy” signal that might override current SiteName structured data for such a long period in one country only? “
Google’s Mueller was puzzled by the situation and didn’t have an answer as to why it was happening. Perhaps it’s one of those rare cases where a bug keeps a part of the index from updating. But he did suggest using the domain name as an alternate site name.
Mueller referred the person to one of Google’s developer pages, “What to do if your preferred site name isn’t selected.”
He responded:
“That’s a bit odd – I’ll pass it on to the team. FWIW what generally 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 weren’t needed.”
The site itself does not appear to contain on-page instances of the rogue branding. The old domain is correctly 301 redirecting to the new domain. However, there are some links in the footer that contain referral codes with the old branding on them, and the sitemap contains links to 404 pages that contain the old branding. Although those may not be the cause of the branding mismatch in the Google search results, it’s a good SEO practice to be tidy about what’s in your sitemaps and to remove outdated links.
These kinds of rare errors are interesting because they kind of provide a sneak peek into a part of Google’s indexing that isn’t normally in view, like a crack in a wall. What insights do you derive from this anomalous situation?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/SsCreativeStudio
