Joomla problem, title tag too long
-
Another problem SEOMOZ reported is that my title tags are too long. However, when I type in the title and the description for a particular page on Joomla, the description later appears not only as the meta description, but as part of the page title as well, thus the title appears to be too long. I have no idea how to seperate those two. Anyone?
-
In Joomla you have you can set up page titles in several places. Global configuration includes use Site Title in page title, Most templates (I just looked at one in JSN Epic) have an SEO option - Enable website title, and you have the option for each page to set metadata options (meta description is here and there is a sitewide meta description).
So, most likely what is happening is you have your settings where you are picking up the site title on every page and then you have put a title on every page (this is the one where alias is under Title).
I would suggest going to Global Configuration and to the right side where it says include site name in page title, mark that as NO. Save and close then look at site (after refreshing). Run SEOmoz page elements before and after and see if there is a change. _If not, you can go back and re check to yes include site title in page titles. (This way you are only changing one thing at a time which is important to track the error and know you are correct). _
If you are still having the problem with meta description, go to Global Config and cut the site meta description out and paste it somewhere else (I am pretty sure you have to be using Explorer for cut and paste in Joomla) or copy it to somewhere so that you do not have to rewrite. Once there is no site meta description, save and close again. Refresh again and run page content from SEOmoz toolbar on a couple of pages. If each page has been given a separate meta desc. then you should be seeing that as opposed to site meta. (Typically the site meta is for the feature page which for our uses is always the home page).
Let us know how this works out and we will follow along. Best.
-
Thank you so much, I will look into this further!
-
If you position your cursor somewhere on your home page, right-click and choose VIEW SOURCE you will notice towards the top of the page the following code:
<title>Free Games Online - Browser Games - Δωρεάν παιχνίδια - Το πρώτο ανεξάρτητο ελληνικό portal για free games online. Παίξτε δωρεάν... freegamesonline.grtitle>
Something within your Joomla software is causing the title to be presented as the title and the meta description combined.
I notice with your screenshot that is not a native Joomla screen. I presume you are using a SEO extension already. It is likely a setting is off within that extension. I would suggest visiting the forums of the extension's creator and asking them why your title and meta descriptions are being merged.
The good thing is you are using the proper tools on your site and discovering issues which need to be fixed. The solution in this case depends on discovering how this problem began in the first place. This seems to be the result of either an issue with an SEO extension, or someone manually modified one of the php page templates for your site.
-
Sure, on every page actually. Eg this is how the mozbar sees the data from my main page
| Page Title | Free Games Online - Browser Games - Δωρεάν παιχνίδια - Το πρώτο ανεξάρτητο ελληνικό portal για free games online. Παίξτε δωρεάν... freegamesonline.gr | 150 |
| Meta Description | Το πρώτο ανεξάρτητο ελληνικό portal για free games online. Παίξτε δωρεάν παιχνίδια στα ελληνικά. |Do you see that the meta description is part of the page title, although on Joomla these are two seperate fields. I attached a screenshot for you to see how it looks like.
-
Where exactly are you seeing this issue? In search results or on your site?
Can you share a URL example of a page with the title tag issue?
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
-
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 -
Are similar title tags frowned upon by search engines?
We are a B2B company that is looking to convert to one global portal very soon. It is only then that we will be able to address a lot of the IA SEO issues we are currently facing. However, we are looking to make some quick fixes, namely adding a proper title to the different country homepages. Will having the same title, with only the country modifier swapped out be a good tactic? Since we want a unified title across all country sites, it just makes sense that we don't change it for every single country. For example: Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company USA Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company Italy Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | France
Technical SEO | | marshseo0 -
Canonical tag refers to itself (???)
Greetings Mozzers. I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous: What I've seen is that on some pages like: www.example.com/page1 There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical" It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential? Cheers Jorge
Technical SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Titles in google serps incorrect
If you do the following query in google: site:orlandovisiting.com legend sparrow You'll see in the results the title appears as: legend-captain-jack-sparrow-1149.html Where the title tag in the source is: <title>The Legend of Captain Jack Sparrow Opens at Disney’s Hollywood Studiostitle> Eventually it normally rights itself, but does anyone else get this with their sites? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | walshy990 -
Use of Multiple Tags
Hi, I have been monitoring some of the authority sites and I noticed something with one of them. This high authority site suddenly started using multiple tags for each post. And I mean, loads of tags, not just three of four. I see that each post comes with at least 10-20 tags. And these tags don't always make sense either. Let's say there is a video for "Bourne Legacy", they list tags like bourne, bourney legacy, bourne series, bourne videos, videos, crime movies, movies, crime etc. They don't even seem to care about duplicate content issues. Let's say the movie is named The Dragon, they would inclue dragon and the-dragon in tags list and despite those two category pages(/dragon and /the-dragon) being exactly the same now, they still wouldn't mind listing both the tags underneath the article. And no they don't use canonical tag. (there isn't even a canonical meta on any page of that site) So I am curious. Do they just know they have a very high DA, they don't need to worry about duplicate content issues? or; I am missing something here? Maybe the extra tags are doing more good than harm?
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
Google showing former meta tags in search results inspite of new tags being crawled by it
I had changed the meta tags for a site www.aztexsodablast.com.au about a month back and Google has also crawled those new tags but in search results when I search for the term 'Aztex Sodablast' it is continuing to show the old tags while on the site, the new tags are being displayed. What may be the issue and how could I correct the problem?
Technical SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Rel-canonical tag
Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?
Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan0