Totally confused by titles being too long!
-
We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past. In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins.
Do I need to go through and change all those titles? How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long? Some are too long only in the archive link...
So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts! Thanks y'all!
-
I have a similar problem but just a mere 500 extra long links. I have whittled 1,148 broken links down to 22 and aiming for zero.
With the titles too long do I need to worry where I have linked out to other sites in a post that that might create new broken links or are there other things I should consider?
I always understood that I could fill that title bar and there would not be a problem. On examining the offending links I see that as the domain name has 32 characters from the first www to the m in .com which when prefaced with http:// and the title in the tilte bar creats a huge url. (I know the domain length is pushing it and know about the number of characters for Adwords)
So I just change the title in Yoast and don't bother about the title at the top of the page and the prermalink that was originally created?
I will do whatever it takes to clear up the problems but would like to sort the title links in one hit as I go through page by page.
Your advice would be appreciated.
-
I want to say Dana is right Yoast will wright the title in a search engine friendly manner
Thomas
-
Dana, it definitely helps! The bigger problem is that with the plug-ins, I can't exactly tell what is too long. Is it the link for the page or what Wordpress considers the title line?
-
Chances are your Titles were being automatically constructed using the Titles of your posts. Yes, you will probably have to go back through and do proper titles for each one so that they don't exceed character lengths in Google and other search engines, but, take heart, it will be worth it. Right now the search engines are either making up their own titles or using truncated versions of your longer titles.
Take the time, go through and write really great titles for those 2,000 posts. It'll benefit you SEO. Don't worry, 2,000 titles really isn't and insurmountable task. You don't need to rework every page, just add titles of the proper length using a plug-in like Yoast. If you do ten a day you can have it done in a month.
Hope that helps a little!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 content or titles
Hello , I am working on a site, I am facing the duplicate title and content errors,
Technical SEO | | KLLC
there are following kind of errors : 1- A link with www and without www having same content. actually its a apartment management site, so it has different bedrooms apartments and booking pages , 2- my second issue is related to booking and details pages of bedrooms, because I am using 1 file for all booking and 1 file for all details page. these are the main errors which i am facing ,
can anyone give me suggestions regarding these issues ? Thnaks,0 -
Duplicate Titles on Wordpress blog pages
Hi, I have an issue where I am getting for duplicate page titles for pages that shouldn't exist. The issue is on the blog index page's (from 0 - 16) and involves the same set of attachment_id for each page, i.e. /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=ponyrides /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=ponyrides There are 6 attachment_id values (and they are not ID values either) which repeat for every page on the index now what I can't work out is where those 6 links are coming from as on the actual blog index page http://www.bosinver.co.uk/blog/page/10/ there are no links to it and the links just go to blog index page and it ignores the attachment_id value. There is no sitemap.xml file either which I thought might have contained the links. Thanks
Technical SEO | | leapSEO0 -
Google changing title tags to branded
Hi guys and gals, i noticed in the results today Google has been changing my title tags so that brand: is in the front of it all. This is not in the code but my title tag structure site-wide is keywords and then always | brand on the end. Why has this happened does anyone know? does it affect my first keyword in the title tag, i guess Google might do it as it recognises the brand and wants users to know it?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Dynamically changing a title with javascript
Hi, I asked our IT team to be able to write custom page titles in our CMS and they came up with a solution that writes the title dynamically with javascript. When I look on the page, I see the title in the browser, but when I look in the source code, I see the original page title. I am thinking that Google won't see the new javascript title, so it will not be indexed and have no impact on SEO. Am I right ?
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
What's best practice for blog meta titles?
I have the option of placing meta titles on the actual blog, or on the blog category on my site. Should I have separate meta titles for each blog or bundle them under a category and try to drive traffic to the category? Can anyone help with best practice?
Technical SEO | | Lubeman0 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
Unique page titles for Joomla
I'm looking for something like Yoast's WordPress SEO but for Joomla. I would be very grateful if you can point me in the right direction.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1