Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?

    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 crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?

    Technical SEO
    5
    10
    3721
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • JasonDGreat
      JasonDGreat last edited by

      I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic.

      This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!!

      Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there.

      http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/

      http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/

      MaeM3.png TLcD8.png

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JasonDGreat
        JasonDGreat @ShaMenz last edited by

        I see. Thanks so much for the effort to explain in detail.

        So, is it because of the yoast wordpress seo plugin i used? Are you using that for your site? Do you have such problem? Because I just installed it prior to the crawl. I was using All In One SEO earlier and the crawl didn't come back with such error.

        Google and Bing seems to have no problem getting my title though. Should I fix it or just ignore the problem?

        Thanks so much again!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • RobertFisher
          RobertFisher last edited by

          Jason,

          Go in and turn off your twitter, G+1, plug in and then re run the app. My guess is you will then see title tags through any moz tool. If so, you can choose a different widget or move placement. (when you deactivate the plug in make sure you clear the cache before running crawl).

          Hope it helps

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • ShaMenz
            ShaMenz @AlanMosley last edited by

            Thanks Alan,

            I like a little mystery hunt 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • AlanMosley
              AlanMosley @ShaMenz last edited by

              Well picked up Sha.

              impressed with you level of detail.

              ShaMenz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • ShaMenz
                ShaMenz last edited by

                Hi Jason,

                There is obviously something going on with this that is affecting what some crawlers are seeing on your pages.

                I ran the Screaming Frog Tool and it shows that the majority of your pages have empty Titles even though I can see that there are Titles loading in the browser.

                On checking your code I see that you are using the pragma directive meta element , but it actually appears below the Title element in the code.

                Example from your code:

                <head>
                <title>Are You Socially Awkward? | Branding Blog | The Bullettitle>
                **<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />**
                

                So I ran the page through the W3C Markup Validation Service  and it also indicates that it sees no character encoding declaration:

                Info No Character encoding declared at document level

                No character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML meta element or an XML declaration.

                So, I believe the issue here may be related to the fact that the pragma directive should appear as close as possible to the top of the head element ie before the Title element.

                The following is from the W3.org documentation on declaring character encoding. You will see that there is specific reference to the fact that the use of the pragma directive is required in the case of XHTML 1.x documents as yours is:

                For XHTML syntax, you should, of course, have " />" after the content attribute, rather than just ">".

                The encoding of the document is specified just after charset=. In this case the specified encoding is the Unicode encoding, UTF-8.

                The pragma directive should be used for pages written in HTML 4.01. It should also be used for XHTML 1.x documents served as HTML, since the HTML parser will not pick up encoding information from the XML declaration.

                In HTML5 you can either use this approach for declaring the encoding, or the newly specified meta charset attribute, but not both in the same page. The encoding declaration should also fit within the first 1024 bytes of the document, so you should generally put it immediately after the opening tag of the head element.

                Hope that helps,

                Sha

                AlanMosley JasonDGreat 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
                • JasonDGreat
                  JasonDGreat @KeriMorgret last edited by

                  Cool. Thanks for reminding, Keri. I thought the help desk will reply to this thread.

                  Sure, I'll post more information back on this thread once I get the answer.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • JasonDGreat
                    JasonDGreat @AlanMosley last edited by

                    Thanks for accessing the site. I hope the next crawl, which will be next week, will be good. Will update you guys.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • KeriMorgret
                      KeriMorgret last edited by

                      That's an interesting one. I'd email that to the help desk at help@seomoz.org to let them know about it. If there's some kind of cause of it that would be helpful for others to know, it'd be great if you could post more information back on this thread.

                      JasonDGreat 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • AlanMosley
                        AlanMosley last edited by

                        I just did a cral on your site using Bings ToolKit, and i did not find any errors concerneing tittle.

                        In fact your site has the best score i have ever got from a wordpress site. Usely a wordpress site is a mess, especialy with un-necasary 301's

                        I found only 2 html errors, 1 un-necessary redirect and multiple h1.

                        Wait to next crawl it may come good.

                        JasonDGreat 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        Got a burning SEO question?

                        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                        Start my free trial


                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • Vanderlindemedia

                          Page with "random" content

                          Hi, I'm creating a page of 300+ in the near future, on which the content basicly will be unique as it can be. However, upon every refresh, also coming from a search engine refferer, i want the actual content such as listing 12 business to be displayed random upon every hit. So basicly we got 300+ nearby pages with unique content, and the overview of those "listings" as i might say, are being displayed randomly. Ive build an extensive script and i disabled any caching for PHP files in specific these pages, it works. But what about google? The content of the pages will still be as it is, it is more of the listings that are shuffled randomly to give every business listing a fair shot at a click and so on. Anyone experience with this? Ive tried a few things in the past, like a "Last update PHP Month" in the title which sometimes is'nt picked up very well.

                          Technical SEO | | Vanderlindemedia
                          0
                        • Mediaholix

                          Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?

                          Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO.  It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors'  Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag.  Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.

                          Technical SEO | | Mediaholix
                          0
                        • hampgunn

                          SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"

                          Hi! We use Hybris as plattform and I would like input on which url to choose. We must keep "/c/" before the actual category. c stands for category. I.e. this current url format will be shortened and cleaned:
                          https://www.granngarden.se/Sortiment/Husdjur/Hund/Hundfoder-%26-Hundmat/c/hundfoder To either: a. 
                          https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/hundfoder/c/hundfoder b.
                          https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder (hundfoder means dogfood) The question is whether we should keep the duplicated category name (hundfoder) before the "/c/" or not. Will there be SEO disadvantages by removing the duplicate "hundfoder" before the "/c/"? I prefer the shorter version ofc, but do not want to jeopardize any SEO rankings or send confusing signals to search engines or customers due to the "/c/" breaking up the url breadcrumb. What do you guys say and prefer from the above alternatives? Thanks /Hampus

                          Technical SEO | | hampgunn
                          0
                        • measurableROI

                          Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?

                          In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location.  It seems to have disappeared in the past few days?  Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever?  Thanks!

                          Technical SEO | | measurableROI
                          0
                        • Webrevolve

                          What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?

                          I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!

                          Technical SEO | | Webrevolve
                          0
                        • gfiedel

                          Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct

                          This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
                          http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
                          http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
                          Thanks!!

                          Technical SEO | | gfiedel
                          0
                        • groovykarma

                          Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?

                          Greetings!  On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24). "Title missing or empty" was 9,676. "Duplicate page content" was 9,678. Whoa!  Content at site has not changed. I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag. Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar. I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place . In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler.  I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages.   Titles were found and hash codes were unique.  Hmmm. Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com Small sample of pages with errors: electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
                          electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
                          electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot. What am I missing please? Thanks kindly, Loren

                          Technical SEO | | groovykarma
                          0
                        • craigycraig

                          301 Redirect "wildcard" question

                          I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.

                          Technical SEO | | craigycraig
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.