Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
HTML entity characters in meta descriptions
Is it okay to leave HTML entity characters, such as " in meta descriptions? Will search engines translate these appropriately?
Technical SEO | Jun 17, 2019, 4:14 PM | ellenu0 -
Duplicate titles from hreflang variations
Hi, I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations. We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows: (We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary) Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them. My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before. It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem. Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | Feb 6, 2019, 3:53 PM | NickG-1230 -
How to show number of products in your Google SERP?
I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM
Technical SEO | Aug 10, 2016, 8:17 AM | promodirect0 -
Special characters in URL
Hi There, We're in the process of changing our URL structure to be more SEO friendly. Right now I'm struggling to find a good way to handle slashes that are part of a targeted keyword. For example, if I have a product page and my product title is "1/2 ct Diamond Earrings in 14K Gold" which of the following URLs is the right way to go if I'm targeting the product title as the search keyword? example.com/jewelry/1-2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/12-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1_2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1%2F2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold Thanks!
Technical SEO | Oct 29, 2012, 4:07 PM | Richline_Digital0 -
Is it possible to change a sitelink title by off page SEO?
Hi all, I checked a website of my company: sitelinks in SERP are with the correct url, but one of the sitelinks’ title is completely irrelevant. Is it possible that it was changed from "outside"? Or maybe it's a bug? Thank you, Imre
Technical SEO | Sep 19, 2012, 2:19 PM | DDL0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | Sep 6, 2011, 8:02 PM | Techboy0 -
Using symbols in the html title of a webpage
If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
Technical SEO | Aug 29, 2011, 4:44 AM | mickey11
thus making it rank worse in search engines here is an example <title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> versus <title><br /> ▶ Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3. By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results0 -
Alt and Title Attributes in Anchor Tags
Does it hurt to use alt and title attributes inside an anchor tag? Example: view my website article
Technical SEO | Jun 25, 2011, 12:52 AM | donationtown0