Change page title in Google results when the response is a 303 redirect

Question

We have a purchased a new domain name (example.com) that was owned by another company and it appears Google has cached the title from the previous owners which was "examPLE". We would like the title to be "Example" instead of "examPLE". I understand that usually you can just change the title on the web page and Google will pull it from that. But in our case the response is a 303 redirect which does not contain any page data.

When you go to our web site it will redirect you to the regional specific site based on IP. So if you are in the UK http://example.com will do a 303 redirect to http://example.com/uk

Is there any way to update the page title in Google’s results in this scenario?

Edit: If I search use the query "site:example.com" in Google the page comes back with the correct title (the one from the page that it is being redirected to), however if I just search on "example" the page title is incorrect.

Answer 1

I suspect you're going to have to put a html page in the way, give the users a button to click for redirection, and wait for Google to re-index.

You can try requesting that Google Remove the page via webmaster tools and then re-include it via webmaster tools, but this may/not cost juice.

Google have a detailed rundown on removal and update options on their official blog, this is the most pertinent part for your situation:-

Changing the page content If you want to remove the cached version of a page because it contained content that you've removed and don't want indexed, you can request the cache removal here. We'll check to see that the content on the live page is different from the cached version and if so, we'll remove the cached version. We'll automatically make the latest cached version of the page available again after six months (and at that point, we likely will have recrawled the page and the cached version will reflect the latest content) or, if you see that we've recrawled the page sooner than that, you can request that we reinclude the cached version sooner using this tool.

But the cache is not always the same as the meta data, my experience is that they update the title tags but the meta descriptions seem to linger forever.