Issue with Title of Homepage - Wordpress Platform
-
I can't seem to get Google to read the title of my homepage the way I would like it to be read and I have double checked in all areas of my Wordpress Platform where the title may be defaulting and all it set up correctly. I have also ensured that the "force re-write of titles and meta descriptions" have been checked through a plugin I am using to monitor SEO (Yoast)... here is an example of how Google is reading my homepage title:
XYZ Company: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company
I would like it to read:
Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company
But for some reason it keeps pulling in my website title.
I have always re-submitted my URL to Google but no luck with the title change.
If anyone has any insight as to why this is defaulting as such I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
-
The boys above have detailed the more technical aspects - the common issue is the length of the title. 1 pixel over 512 pixels and the title truncates as you have described above. I have seen it truncate as you have described from 487 pixels.
I tested your example and that is 580 pixels. XYZ Company: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company
Hence on your example to reduce the pixel width and also for a better CTR I also recommend you use the pipe | and not the hyphen -. Plus you may need to extract Canada etc.
So confirming have you checked the Title is 512 pixels or less? If still truncating test 487 pixels to be safe. I built my own title tester given it is such a common issue so I could measure the pixels https://www.predikkta.com/products/free-serp-optimizer-tool.html
Hope it is as simple as outlined above. I add it is worth getting right as it has a strong influence on CTR.
-
Make Sure your site Title is edited properly within WordPress. From the left sidebar in your back end select settings---> General then site Title. Do not add anything to the tagline as many themes use this as the title also. Yoast does not let you edit the home page title through the plugin unless you are using a static home page.
If that is the case you must go to Settings ---> Reading then select the page you want as your static page. This means the page must already be created. If you do it this way you can use the Yoast meta boxes to insert your title.
-
Hi there
I recommend reading Google's resource on this:
"If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through." Here are a couple more resources:
Why Google won’t display the right page title (Yoast)
Why Google Changes Your Titles in Search Results (SEW)Read through all of the above as they have tips and resources to reference to help you.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Meta Titles and Descriptions Issue in Google Webmaster Tool
Hello All, We have one site named http://www.bargains-online.com.au/ & have some categories along with filter option on left side like filter by price & by brand, ect. We have already set rel canonical tags on all filtered pages, but still those all pages showing duplicate page titles and description warning in HTML Improvements section in Google Webmaster Tool. For Example: http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners.html We've set rel canonical tag on below pages. http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/manufacturer:black-eagle.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:2,100.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:3,100.html Kindly request if anybody has any solutions for the same, please share with us. Thanks, Akshay
Technical SEO | | akshaydesai0 -
Website Redesign - Blogger To WordPress Platform URL Structure
I am transferring a website (www.EXAMPLE.com) From Blogger To Wordpress. Currently, the website content is specific to cover the Colorado Market. In the near future, I plan on covering the same market in other state. I have seen regional websites like this that have the URL structure - (STATE.EXAMPLE.com) I have also seen websites with URL Structure - (EXAMPLE.COM/STATE) Is there any advantage using one URL structure over the other in term of SEO & otherwise? In the process of transferring the website, I would like to clean-up the URL structure but I don't want to lose a significant amount of link juice/organic traffic. Do you recommend I restructure the URLs at this time?
Technical SEO | | InternetRep0 -
Google is not respecting the meta title
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title> In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question): <hgroup> Pilar Soro
Technical SEO | | ofuente
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí. Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup> Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now The point is that google has considered that this particular is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com". Two things for which this is even more strange are the following: while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others? the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last? What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10 on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after. Provided this situation, we would like to know: is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people? why is it happening? Is it somehow related to , <hgroup>and ? why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages? more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow? Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received! AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232 </hgroup>0 -
Wordpress Pods and Wordpress SEO by Yoast
Hi I am optimising a new site that has been built in Wordpress using Pods. The Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin is not recognising any content on the site - has anyone any ideas on how to get around this - does it matter - is it the plugin that is at fault rahter than the set up of the site?
Technical SEO | | Highlandgael1 -
Newbie Duplicate Title Question
We recently update our website with DNN 6. Once the upgrade was done, I kept recieving log in links on my duplicate title and duplicate content error reports. Is anyone familiar with how to stop these links from showing up? Example of link: http://www.faisongroup.com/Login/tabid/750/Default.aspx?returnurl=%2F Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | VeronicaCFowler0 -
Crawling issues in google
Hi everyone, I think i have crawling issues with one of my sites. It has vanished form Google rankings it used to rank for all services i offered now it doesn't anymore ever since September 29th. I have resubmitted to Google 2 times and they came back with the same answer: " We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. " How i detected that it may be a crawling issue is that 2 weeks ago i changed metas - metas are very slow in getting updated and for some of my pages never did update Do you know any good tools to check for bad code that could slow down the crawling. I really don't know where to look other than issues for crawling. I validated the website with w3c validator and ran xenu and cleaned these up but my website is still down. Any ideas are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
SEO for Wordpress
I am sure you have been asked this many times... What is the BEST Wordpress Plug-in for SEO - Easy to Title Page, Meta Tags, etc... ?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tab540 -
Duplicate homepage content
Hi, I recently did a site crawl using seomoz crawl test My homepage seems to have 3 cases of duplicate content.. These are the urls www.example.ie/ www.example..ie/%5B%7E19%7E%5D www.example..ie/index.htm Does anyone have any advise on this? What impact does this have on my seo?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0