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I'm having an issue with Google sitelinks where the page titles are showing in lowercase only.

I've tried several things to remedy this issue, the page titles and meta data for the page all indicate the desired outcome which is FULL CAPITALISATION. Inspecting the page source shows only 2 refererences to the words 'mixes | features' and 'envisioned disorder' in the page body and both are FULL CAPITALISATION also.

One of my collegues thinks it might be Google's search cache, but I'm just wondering if it might be something else. Can anyone shed some light on this?

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    Why is FULL CAPITALIZATION DESIRED? It looks ugly. My guess is that Google doesn't want all caps in the search results and just lowercases the whole thing when you try to do that. Have you tried using mixed case to see if that comes through?
    – Stephen Ostermiller on Strike ♦
    Apr 3, 2018 at 20:04
  • @StephenOstermiller Full Caps is desired for continuity of aesthetic with the site, sitelinks have only appeared in the last week so I have run any tests like that yet, I'll give it a go, thanks!
    – van
    Apr 3, 2018 at 20:16
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    Google doesn't give a fork... about your site's aesthetically. When you visit Google... you're on their site and subject to their styles, not yours. If they didn't enforce it then we would have everyone using capitals or worse RuBbiSh LikE tHiS, Google and Bing only allows a few words to be capitalized, preferably unique brand names. The very best you can do is Something Like This but that may change to first capitalise at its a start of a sentence otherwise branding keywords are needed. Summary... it's out of your control and as I said... their site, not yours and subject to their styles
    – Simon Hayter
    Apr 3, 2018 at 21:48
  • I agree with using mixed case. That's the standard formatting for meta tags. And as already said, Google doesn't want to show full cap results in its search.
    – Michael d
    Apr 4, 2018 at 11:00
  • @SimonHayter, Whilst I understand the points you are making I am not interested in being able to 'style' the sitelinks as you would do with CSS etc, more I'm wondering if there is a way to influence this through meta data or otherwise. I'm going to try 'First Letter' capitalisation and some other options, if I find anything that works I'll post here. Thanks!
    – van
    Apr 4, 2018 at 22:19

1 Answer 1

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I am back with updates, confirming that using FULL CAPS on any word (or combination of words) seems to trigger lowercase for all words included in the page title and description. I have since remedied this and after several weeks of trial and error, I now have the correct formatting for all sitelinks:

ABYF_SL

EDIT:

For clarity/detail:

  • Google's desired input is what could just be considered 'standard correct formatting' (i.e First Letter Capitalisation for people, places and wherever else they would normally be required);
  • The use of words in FULL CAPS is 'allowed' for regular pages, but I have not been able to create a sitelink that contains even 1 word in CAPS;
  • You cannot use FULL CAPS in sitelinks page titles as this triggers all lowercase;
  • You can use 1 word CAPS in the pages description/meta data description;
  • Sitelinks description snippets are taken from the first paragraph of the body unless otherwise specified (via SEO plugin/extension etc);
  • Something else I think is helping here is my sitemap file which has correctly specified priority tags for each of these pages, (i.e the parent page has priority 0.8, the Mixes | Feature page has priority 0.7 and all other pages have priority 0.6);

Timelines:

  • [Google Search Cache] Each time I updated the pages to test I also went to webmaster tools and requested re-crawling of the URL's that I had changed, some instances were quicker than others but most ranged from a few days to 2 weeks between updates;
  • Sitelinks regularly change between content, the 4 sitelinks visible in this screenshot are not necessarily the same ones that would be seen in a few days or a week's time.
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