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
-
Is having the same title tag on a blog listing page and blog date archives an SEO issue?
Hi there, Can anyone answer whether having duplicate title tags on the blog listing page (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/) and the blog date archive pages (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/archive/2017/10) is an issue? If so why is it an issue and what are the best practices of dealing with this? Thanks! John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
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 -
SEO Question - Are 503/504 errors an issue?
Lately I've noticed more and more 503/504 errors being flagged in my MOZ reports. One week I had over 1300 errors show up. I checked Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools and noticed they were showing up in there too, although not near as many (50 or less per day). I contacted my hosting company about it and they said these were normal and that it was due to one nameserver reaching capacity, but that there was a backup nameserver that kicks in. I've seen one or two of these errors show up before, but never more than one or two a week. Is this something I should be concerned about?
Technical SEO | | Kyle Eaves0 -
My SERP meta description is displaying 315 characters...
Hi Mozzers, We have recently taken the #2 spot for our main keyword in Google UK serp. I just checked again and we have dropped to #4 and our meta description is no longer there as it has been replaced with some homepage content... 315 characters of homepage content right up to the full stop. I'm a little confused. A couple of our competitors meta descriptions are showing the same, extra long homepage text instead. Is there something totally normal and harmless causing this or do I need to be monitoring/changing something? Has Google made an update to allow for longer meta decs? Any advice appreciated! sWrBcuB.png
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect
Hello, I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things: Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs. http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
Technical SEO | | Barques-Design
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0" Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown? For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat0 -
Meta Description
Working with a business that is having some real issues. They had some client information that was showing up in the meta description. Personal phone numbers for example. Our developers removed all the information from the pages in question two days ago, but we are still seeing the info in the meta description. Any idea how long this will take to be recrawled and fixed? Anything I can do to get recrawled sooner? Also, this is only happening in Bing/Yahoo and not in Google. Thanks for any help you can provide!
Technical SEO | | PGD20110 -
Duplicate Title/Meta Descriptions
Hi I had some error messages in the webmaster account, stating I had duplicate title/meta descriptions. Ive since fixed it, typically how long does it take for a full crawl if Ive fixed these issues? Webmaster is still showing problems with various Title/Descriptions. Also was wondering if I should block individual pages on a large ecomerce site? EX of a Large site - http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/ (Page is structure and optimized) Then you have all individual games http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/bears-vs-lions-soldier-field-4077064/ they have an H1 and a meta description, should the page above be blocked from google and concentrate only on the Pain page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Can these Yoast SEO integration issued be solved?
I had a site analysis done by the Yoast team. Of course, one of their recommendations was to install the Yoast SEO product. I see that there are many independent sources highly recommending it. But my programming is coming back with some concerns. My website is www.heartspm.com, for anyone who is interested in further analysis of my issue. My programmer's notes follow. Unfortunately, they are a bit to cryptic: "1. it does not do all for us anyway, so we'd have to keep the one's I made
Technical SEO | | GerryWeitz
before anyway, at least partially, but it will add up to complexety, loading
time as all new, and especially one-size-fits all plugins 2. another problem - Simple Press forum. Yoast does not have an extention for it, nor is it going to work along with our existing forum's SEO handling solution. So, it's
either reverting back to original SEO handling or forgetting Yoast. 3. original handling means no meta description although I think Yoast will put just
one description for each page, and title will be something like "<forum <br="">title> - <topic title="">whatever else you may want" 4. the same thing with XML sitemap 5. we won't be able to use Yoast's because it won't handle cities 6. and hopefully it will work with our existing XML sitemap solution as this can be turned off" Now, The Yoast team admitted and logically said that the Yoast plugin cannot support another plugin and therefore it does not support forums. We currently integrate the forum into our Wordpress site and perhaps imperfectly, but we are able to append forum links to the xml sitemap. Do any of you have insight into how one incorporates a forum into a Wordpress blog while using Yoast SEO?</topic></forum> We have special parameter based handling of cities. We used to pass codes like city=?zip and the like. Now, the URLS are very clean looking, but they use templates to match up cities in a city table with content that is somewhat similar, yet customizable. So my programmer seems to be saying that the Yoast tool doesn't seem to handle templates well or is not able to interpret it and get it into a sitemap. Do any of you have insight into using Yoast SEO with Wordpress sites that use templates and variables for locals or something of a similar nature? The Yoast SEO module also has switches to help resolve issues with duplicate content and archives and authors and multiple pages, i.e. page 1-10 of Latest News. If I can't use the whole Yoast module, are there ways to use only parts of it or to strip it down to what I want? Do you think with the above considerations, that the Yoast SEO module is not worth the trouble? Thanks in advance, Humbly, Gerry0