Why are apostrophes and other characters still showing as code in my titles?
-
Hi,
I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally.
Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ.
Example:
Normal visitor sees:
About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts
Google and SEOMOZ see:
About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts
I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work.
Any help or explanation would be appreciated.
-
Gabriel-
It's no problem for these codes to appear in other sections of the page. There are many character sets out there, and what may appear great to you (without codes) looks like gibberish to someone else. The codes help make for a uniform experience for everyone. For instance, there are no "smart quote" keys on your keyboard, yet some programs (like Word) will automatically insert these for you. To have these on a web page most systems will convert these to codes for you. The ampersand, however, falls into this category since it's often an escape character for other characters.
So, the place we're still really most concerned about is the meta title. I'm not sure why the mb_convert_encoding() function didn't work for you?
If you'd like me to take a closer look feel free to message me. This is solvable - I've done it before on WP sites.
-
One more thing - I've noticed that Google, SEOMOZ, and Firefox's View Source all show apostrophes, ampersands, and other characters as code not just in the title tag but also throughout the body of the page - so it is a general problem.
-
I actually removed site caching because it was causing some problems. But yes, I had it on previously.
I'm wondering if the wordpress function - wp_texturize - is doing something funny to the titles...
-
Gabriel-
Do you have some sort of site caching turned on?
-
Fixed some of the other issues with my site (had a bunch of white spaces in my php files) but this is still not working. I inserted your code and it doesn't break anything, but it doesn't work either from what I can tell...
-
Gabriel, I think we're close here... give this a try:
<title></p> <p><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?></p> <p><?php echo mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo('name', 'display'), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES'); ?></p> <p></title>
-
Okay, I found the line:
<title><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
And I tried inserting your code multiple ways but now Fetch as Googlebot is saying the site is unreachable. I've reversed but still get same problem...
Strange stuff.
-
Look in your header.php file. Here's what the <title>tag code might look like. Again, you may need to wrap the mb function around more than one piece. This should get you started.</p> <blockquote style="color: #5e5e5e; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; 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><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><title><?php</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">/*</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>Print the <title> tag based on what is being viewed.</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span> */</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">global $page, $paged;</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">wp_title( '|', true, 'right' );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add the blog name.</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>bloginfo( 'name' );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add the blog description for the home/front page.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">$site_description = mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' ), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>echo " | $site_description";</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add a page number if necessary:</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>echo ' | ' . sprintf( __( 'Page %s', 'oldheidelbergdeli' ), max( $paged, $page ) );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">?></title>
-
Thanks for looking into this. Approximately where would I place this code?
-
This worked for me....
$site_description = mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' ), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');
The text is getting encoding in the second half of your meta tag, so if you convert the encoding you should be able to get around this. You may need to apply this to several sections of that depending on what's going on... check the tag out on several pages.
Let me know how it works out.
-
Well what would be the html entity code for a standard apostrophe. And even if that is solved, the & is still not displaying correctly.
I've searched many forums for the answer but nothing seems to be coming up!
-
Hi Gabriel,
' Looks like an html entity code for some non-standard apostrophe. Not sure why though, it looks normal. Your apostrophe might need to be changed to a single quote instead.
-
I've done what you've said and this is what I've come up with:
<title><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
Does anything look odd?
-
Ahh, you are right about the first ampersand. You should probably take a look at the wp_title() function and see if it's doing any html_special_chars filtering. Again, if nothing else seems to work, you could change up the "and" remove the possessive on Vancouver.
-
Thanks for the quick reply. I tried doing that but not luck. The odd thing is that using Google's Webmaster tools, I see that the meta title and some of the headings have the code in them whereas other body text doesn't. Either way, I need to resolve this.
I tested a page and here are a couple of lines:
<code><title>IT & Web Services | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts</title> Odd how the first & (and) looks fine whereas the second doesn't.</code>
-
Hey Gabriel-
Quick and dirty... you could change the meta title to Function 5 - Metro Vancouver IT and Web Experts.
Have you tried putting the full & in the meta title? There might be a double-conversion issue going on there.
-John
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
-
Old url is still indexed
A couple of months ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of indexed pages is reduced to 1. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
My g+ picture stopped showing up on my rankings. What do I do?
How do I get my g+ picture to start showing up again? It just stopped showing up, and I'm not sure how to get it to come back. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
/home-2 showing in SERPS but not the homepage
I'm in the process of having a site built using WP as the cms, and keeping SEO in mind while it's being produced. Because I'm experimenting with title/meta desc I'm checking rankings each day on whatsmyserp dot com. During development I noticed one day the ranking for websitename.com had disappeared and websitename.com/home-2 was ranking. I went into pages of the wp account and deleted the 2nd homepage that had been created for some reason, and that was over half a week ago now. /home-2 is still ranking even though it's non-existent and the actual homepage url isn't ranking at all. Any suggestions on what I should do/why this is happening? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | xcyte0 -
Re-using site code.
Hi, I'm looking at launching a new website, and am keen to understand whether re-using the basic code behind one of my other sites will cause me an issue. I'll be changing the directory structure/ file names, etc - but it will basically leave me with a very similar-looking site to another in my portfolio - using code thats all ready out there, etc. Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | newstd1000 -
No crawl code for pages of helpful links vs. no follow code on each link?
Our college website has many "owners" who want pages of "helpful links" resulting in a large number of outbound links. If we add code to the pages to prevent them from being crawled, will that be just as effective as making every individual link no follow?
Technical SEO | | LAJN0 -
Wordpress creates duplicate Title Tags.
Pasted from GWT with relation to Duplicate Title Tags: Gold News | FalkosGold - Page 2
Technical SEO | | MangoMM
/category/scrap-gold-news/page/2/
/tag/scrap-gold-news/page/2/ 2 Gold News | FalkosGold
/category/scrap-gold-news/
/tag/scrap-gold-news/ 2 Scrap Platinum | FalkosGold
/gold-platinum-prices/scrap-platinum/
/tag/scrap-platinum/ 2 Any idea how I fix this? Screenshot attached. Many thanks bVJeI.png0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Is it a bad that my site has the same title and description for directory listings?
I manually listed my site in a few hundred free directories, two paid directores (Joe ant $40, and dirmania $12), and 50 directories that require a reciprocal link ( I paid for a cheap service that gets around having to do the reciprocal). I made the big mistake of having the title and the description for these as the same or very close to the same...is this a huge problem? Should I have my site removed from the free directories or just let it go? I've since stopped focusing on all the directories, and considering saving up to get in Yahoo directory. Working now on getting legit and relevant links from .edu sites.
Technical SEO | | eugenecomputergeeks0