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!
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
-
Is having my homepage on a subfolder harmful?
Hi guys, I am the webmaster of the following two websites: www.gpblog.com/nl
Technical SEO | | NielsDE
www.gpblog.com/en The first URL is the Dutch version of GPBlog, the second URL is the UK version of GPblog. Whenever a person visits www.gpblog.com he gets redirected to either the Dutch version or the UK version based on his location. My question is: is it harmful to have 1. your homepage on a subfolder and 2. is it harmful to run two different languages on one domain using this technique? Thank you in advance!1 -
Http to https redirection issue
Hi, i have a website with http but now i moved to https. when i apply 301 redirection from http to https & check in semrush it shows unable to connect with https & similar other tool shows & when i remove redirection all other tools working fine but my https version doesn't get indexed in google. can anybosy help what could be the issue?
Technical SEO | | dhananjay.kumar10 -
Webmaster internal links issue
Hi All, In webmaster > Internal links https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/internal-links?hl=en&siteUrl= I get counts as in the image http://imgur.com/9bO5H0f is this logical and ok or should i work on finding why so many links and reduce them? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
Wordpress multisite and SEO
Newbie question. I have several keyword list I am trying to market - (My website is : http://www.soobumimphotography.com/) San Antonio wedding photographer, family photographer San Antonio sports photographer in san antonio headshot san antonio engagement photos san antonio I think it's too broad and thinking about getting separate sites for them. I know I can make urls something like this http://www.soobumimphotography.com/headshot using multisite function and planning to redirect it to www.sanantonioheadshots.com etc Is this good idea to do so? Should I get a new hosting and domain and start it all over again. Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Wordpress initial setup
Hello I am going to create a new WP site. Basically, I would like to have your suggestions for the initial setup (checklist) in terms of SEO. For example: xml sitemap, robots.txt, .htaccess, permalinks, www or no www, etc Basically, I would like to start in the right way Any advise would be appreciate. Thank you so much Andy
Technical SEO | | newsmile0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Duplicate Page Title with Pretashop
We have our main website and blog in Wordpress under www.enasport.com and our shop with Prestashop under www.enasport.com/productos so all our products have for example www.enasport.com/productos/56-creatina-monohidrato.html I wonder if this is the problem with Duplicate Page Title as seems we have more than 200 of this issue. Is there any way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | ENASports0