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.
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
-
Hi ,
One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is"PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif )
Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason)I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif)Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"?Thanks in advance,
Kadel -
Hi Christy ,Sorry for the delay.
I can't be 100% sure (after all it's Google) but here's what I did.
On the homepage I've changed the title into this format:
brand name + "|" + slogan with keyword
while on the rest of the pages I have not changed the title and left it in the following format: Page's Title + "|" + Brand name After that , this website's title results appeared as above , without ":" or re-position of the brand in the title.Hope it will help.
-
Hi Kadel, what is the current status of this issue? Any updates to report? Cheers, Christy
-
I experience different results: when the brand name is in front on the title like "Brand - Tag Line" and you search for "tag line" google modifies the title to "Tag Line: Brand" which is quite annoying for me.
I tested for a couple of month "Brand - Tag Line 1 | Tag Line 2" and searching for "tag line" didn't produced any title change, yet I hate the way the pipe looks on the title, so we decided to move back to "Brand - Tag Line" and well, stand whatever google decides to modify.
-
In Adwords the | (pipe) is not allowed in ads anymore. Maybe this is the case for organic too. You can use a - (dash) though and you should be good to go.
-
I believe I've found the answer so I'm posting it here for anyone else who would like to know:
There don’t appear to be any examples of colon insertion if the brand name is already at the front of the page title. This is interesting since when Google decides to tweak the titles as above, it removes the dash or the pipe and replaces these with a colon. However if the brand name is already at the front, Google is happy to leave the dash or the pipe in.
From: http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand
I am about to change the brand name to Hebrew so it will be in front of the page title so I'll be able to confirm it.
Will update you with the results.
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
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Why is "Noindex" better than a "Canonical" for Pagination?
"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://moz.com/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
How to prevent 404's from a job board ?
I have a new client with a job listing board on their site. I am getting a bunch of 404 errors as they delete the filled jobs. Question: Should we leave the the jobs pages up for extra content and entry points to the site and put a notice like this job has been filled, please search our other job listings ? Or should I no index - no follow these pages ? Or any other suggestions - it is an employment agency site. Overall what would be the best practice going forward - we are looking at probably 20 jobs / pages per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0