My bad - you are right that it doesn't display the actual URLs. So I guess the best thing you can do is site:examplesite.com and see what comes up.

I would use Google Webmaster Tools as you can see how many URLs are indexed based on your sitemap. Once you have that, you can compare it to your total list. The same can be done with Bing.

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...

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...

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.

Thanks for looking into this. Approximately where would I place this code?

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!

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?

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>

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.