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.
SEO plugin by Yoast messing up my title/meta description
-
Hey guys,
I'm having some issues with my wordpress blog, and I believe SEO plugin by Yoast could be the one causing it.
I have set a title for my wordpress blog, and a tagline. This was set in dashboard > settings > general
Under "titles and metas" > home in the plugin it says, title: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%, and meta description is blank.
The reports on seomoz says my title is title+meta description - making it to long (to many characters).
What could be the issue here?
Thanks in advance!
-
You too man!
-
That did the trick! Thanks for the support.
Have a great weekend.
-
In Google Chrome:
1. Right click on the page in question and select: View page source
2. Search for <title></em> to see your title</p> <p>3. Search for <em><span><meta </span><span>name</span><span>="</span><span>description</span><span>"</span></em> to see your description</p> <p>Shout if you get stuck!</p> <p>Cheers<br />Marcus </p></title>
-
Awesome, thanks Marcus!
Just one last thing, where can I in an easy way see what my title and meta description/title is? To see if it works.
-
If you are using the SEO plugin it allows various variables in the title templates. So, to use the page / post title and the site name you would use:
%%title%% | %%sitename%%
To use the title and the site description you would use:
%%title%% | %%sitedesc%%
If you wanted title, site name, site description
%%title%% | %%sitename%% | %%sitedesc%%
If you go to the help tag under the Titles & Meta's section you can get a full list of these variables you can get to customise your template titles.
But, the plugin also allows you to customise on a page by page basis in the page / post settings which is also really useful.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
In the plugin this code is put in the title template box: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%
Maybe this is the reason why title and tag line/meta description is put as title? The "%%sitedesc%%" should perhaps be put in the Meta description template beneath?
-
I tried disabling, and what I got now was an empty title. What does that tell me?
That's the problem, part of the title should be in the meta description (as it is put under "tag line" in wordpress settings > general.
Put the tagline is shown right after the title in the title.
-
Hey, page title looks fine, no meta description though by the look of things?
-
Marcus,
First of all, thanks for the reply!
I will try to disable the plugin and see what happens.
Where do need a link? Here is to the blog in question blogg.loveday.se (don't know if it is of any use though, as it is in swedish).
-
Hey Daniel
Hard to say without a link but the first thing I would do would be to disable the plugin and see if that puts things right. If that does not work, the plugin may have some incompatibilities with your theme or your theme may have some problems itself.
The Yoast plugin has some configuration that allows you to force the rewriting of the titles so you can check to see if that is enabled on the titles and metas page (and try turning it on / off).
Ultimately, this is likely a theme conflict and many themes have their own SEO settings that may need to be disabled or removed so I would look there firfst.
Can you post a link?
Marcus
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 | | ellenu0 -
If you use canonicals do the meta descriptions need to be different?
For example, we have 3 different subsites with the same pages. We will put canonicals so they reference the main pages. Do the meta descriptions have to be different for each of the three pages? How does Google handle meta data when using canonicals?
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
Create Page Titles from H1 using Yoast?
I'm working on a site that has 280 blog posts that have either been migrated from an old CMS site or created on the Dev version of the new WordPress site. We've written 280 unique meta descriptions so they don't truncate but it there a quick way I can export the current H1s and then import them into Yoast so they are set as the Page Titles? I've written unique Page Titles and meta descriptions for all the Service and Products page and just want a way to speed up the blog posts as their H1s are really good and what I would use as Page Titles anyway. Any help, greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Can you force Google to use meta description?
Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
How to Delete the slug /category/ from wordpress category pages
Hi all, I would like to ask you what's the better way to eliminate the slug /category/ form the wordpress category pages. I need to delete the slug /category/ to make the url seo frendly. The problem is that my site is an old site with the page indexed by Google for a long time. Thanks for your advice.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0