In Crawl Diagnostics, length of title element is incorrect
-
Hey all,
It appears the Moz crawler is misreading the number of characters in my website's page titles. It shows 72 characters for the following page's title element:
http://giavan.com/products/orange-crystal-chain-necklace-with-drop
The page title for this web page is: Orange Crystal Chain Necklace with Drop | Giavan
which is 48 characters. As it stands, this page title is displayed at 48 characters in Google SERPs.
I am getting "This Element is Too Long" issue on 925 pages, which is just about the entire site. These issues appeared after I added additional Shopify (Liquid) code to the page title. If you inspect the code, you will see title element looks a bit odd with extra spacing and line breaks.
What I'd like to know is whether or not it's necessary to rewrite the Shopify code, for SEM purposes. My feeling is that it's okay because the page titles look fine in SERPs but those 925 Moz crawl errors are kind of scary.
Thanks for your help!
-
This appears to have fixed the problem, thank you. Had to add a non-breaking space before {% endif %}{{ page_title }} but from what I can tell, your solution resolved the character count discrepancy. I expect this will be validated when Moz re-crawls the site.
-
Ok this might help without changing any code really. The way most templating languages work is they preserve spaces and returns between statements so they can be formatted correctly. Just put your code on one line like this
{% if current_tags %} {{ current_tags | join: ', ' | capitalize }}{% endif %}{{ page_title }}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} | {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}
With no spaces in between. Then test it, if everything is run together just a space between the variable. But that should take out the hard returns and return your title tag on one line like normal.
-
Here is the liquid code. It inserts tags like "Red" and "Teardrop" into the page title to make the page title more descriptive.
<title><br /> {% if current_tags %} {{ current_tags | join: ', ' | capitalize }}{% endif %}<br /> {{ page_title }}<br /> <br /> {% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}<br /> {% unless page_title contains shop.name %} | {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Thanks so much for helping me out with this.
-
The post by Tiffany is correct, but most crawlers like moz work on string length. What the issue looks like is that the template is sending out a lot of white space that is being counted in the string length. Where this comes into play and why it is not noticeable is this. In html if you have two spacebar spaces, it will only render as one space in viewports. But in the code you will still have the two spaces.
The best solution to fix what you have would be to try to attach a filter to your current code, thus reducing the number of blank spaces and line breaks. Can you past what liquid code you currently have to generate the page title and I might can work something out to test. I haven't used liquid before, but it looks close enough to smarty that I might could work something out.
-
It is my understanding that it is based on pixels and not so much characters count. For example:
mommy
little
Mommy is only 5 characters, while Little is a whole character more. However, it is the actual distance, not the character count. At least that is my understanding.
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
-
Exact Keyword is Used in Page Title & Exact Keyword Used in Document Text at Least Once
Hi Folks, I have a page https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation that grades with the 'On-Page Grader' as a B grade for the keyword 'itil foundation' but reports that there is no 'Exact Keyword is Used in Page Title' and 'Exact Keyword Used in Document Text at Least Once'. The thing is, it actually is but because of IP (intellectual property) rights we have to include a '®' (®) symbol when we mention the course title 'ITIL® Foundation'. Now I believe Google is smart enough to recognise that this symbol should not be included but it seems that for the specific criteria mentioned above, the MOZ bot isn't smart enough to recognise this, even though it recognises the keyword usage elsewhere. So my question is this. Would this constitute an issue in terms of ranking? Another question I have, is how significant are the gains with shorter URL's? For example, the URL to the page in question is: https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation Would a URL such as below have a significant effect on SEO?: https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-foundation Thanks for your feedback.
Moz Pro | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Rogerbot crawls my site and causes error as it uses urls that don't exist
Whenever the rogerbot comes back to my site for a crawl it seems to want to crawl urls that dont exist and thus causes errors to be reported... Example:- The correct url is as follows: /vw-baywindow/cab_door_slide_door_tailgate_engine_lid_parts/cab_door_seals/genuine_vw_brazil_cab_door_rubber_68-79_10330/ But it seems to want to crawl the following: /vw-baywindow/cab_door_slide_door_tailgate_engine_lid_parts/cab_door_seals/genuine_vw_brazil_cab_door_rubber_68-79_10330/?id=10330 This format doesn't exist anywhere and never has so I have no idea where its getting this url format from The user agent details I get are as follows: IP ADDRESS: 107.22.107.114
Moz Pro | | spiralsites
USER AGENT: rogerbot/1.0 (http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-, rogerbot-crawler+pr1-crawler-17@moz.com)0 -
Seo moz has only crawled 2 pages of my site. Ive been notified of a 403 error and need an answer as to why my pages are not being crawled?
SEO Moz has only crawled 2 pages of my clients site. I have noticed the following. A 403 error message screaming frog also cannot crawl the site but IIS can. Due to the lack of crawling ability, im getting no feed back on my on page optimization rankings or crawl diagnostics summary, so my competitive analysis and optimization is suffering Anybody have any idea as to what needs to be done to rectify this issue as access to the coding or cms platform is out of my hands. Thank you
Moz Pro | | nitro-digital0 -
Crawl Diagnostics: Next crawl date is in the past
Hi - I have quite a few crawl diagnostic errors and warnings. I have attempted to fix many of them but noticed this note at the bottom of the crawl diagnostics chart: "Last Crawl Completed: Mar. 22nd, 2013 Next Crawl Starts: Mar. 29th, 2013" It looks like SEOMoz thinks the next crawl date is Mar 29th, 2013, which is two weeks ago. Is there any way to "force" the crawl and get it back on regular schedule? This may have happened when my account was disabled because my credit card expired...Thoughts?
Moz Pro | | 6thirty0 -
Does crawling help in optimisation.?
the website is as it was last week. no optimisation from my side for 10 days now. i was ranked 5 with my keyword not much competition there. however 2 days ago i registrred at seomoz and created a campaign for my website with my keywords that were ranked 5 in search. today i see that my rank has gone up to 2. i have nt done any optimisation neither have ii created any backlinks. so how and why did i climb up? i just created a campaign and let seomoz crawl my website for 2days. am i to assume seomoz crawl optimises website? if that is the case then can i create a campaign crawl pages, climb up in searches, delete the campaign after a week, create it again crawl pages and climb up and so on ? please advise?
Moz Pro | | wahin10 -
Adjusting SEOmoz Crawling Speed
How do you adjust the SEOmoz crawling speed? SEOmoz tried to crawl 10,000 pages in 3 hours and crashed our MySQL server.
Moz Pro | | cappuccino891 -
Did anyone else see "Rel Canonical" drop to zero after their latest SEOmoz crawl?
In the Crawl Diagnostics section of the SEOmoz reports, we get errors in red, warnings in yellow, and notices in blue. After my latest crawl, I saw the "Rel Canonical" part go from about 300 down to 0. Obviously, this isn't right, so I'm wondering if this is a bug that everyone is experiencing. U9W5I
Moz Pro | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Crawl complete, but nothing changed?
Hi everyone, According to my account, the crawl diagnostics were completed yesterday. However, the duplicate page titles that it mentions aren't correct. The changes that I implemented several days ago are not being shown in the report. When I click the duplicate page title links, the latest date in the graph is 3/26. However, it says the crawl was completed on 3/30. Does it take a few days for the reports to match what the crawl actually discovered?
Moz Pro | | beeneeb0