Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
-
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/
-
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!
-
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
-
Thanks Alan,
I like a little mystery hunt
-
Well picked up Sha.
impressed with you level of detail.
-
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:
No Character encoding declared at document levelNo character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML
metaelement 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
-
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.
-
Thanks for accessing the site. I hope the next crawl, which will be next week, will be good. Will update you guys.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Are correcting missing meta descrption tags a good use of time?
My modest website (shew-design.com) has pulled up nearly sixty crawl errors. Almost all of them are missing meta description tags. One friend who knows SEO better than me says that adding meta tags to EVERY page is not a good use of time. My site is available at shew-design.com I'm just getting started in being serious about applying SEO to our site and I want to make sure I'm making the best use of my time. The other error I'm getting are duplicate page names within different directories (e.g. getting started (for branding), getting started (for web). Is this a huge priority? Would welcome your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Eric_Shew0 -
Salvaging links from WMT “Crawl Errors” list?
When someone links to your website, but makes a typo while doing it, those broken inbound links will show up in Google Webmaster Tools in the Crawl Errors section as “Not Found”. Often they are easy to salvage by just adding a 301 redirect in the htaccess file. But sometimes the typo is really weird, or the link source looks a little scary, and that's what I need your help with. First, let's look at the weird typo problem. If it is something easy, like they just lost the last part of the URL, ( such as www.mydomain.com/pagenam ) then I fix it in htaccess this way: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ RewriteRule ^pagenam$ "http://www.mydomain.com/pagename.html" [R=301,L] But what about when the last part of the URL is really screwed up? Especially with non-text characters, like these: www.mydomain.com/pagename1.htmlsale www.mydomain.com/pagename2.htmlhttp:// www.mydomain.com/pagename3.html" www.mydomain.com/pagename4.html/ How is the htaccess Rewrite Rule typed up to send these oddballs to individual pages they were supposed to go to without the typo? Second, is there a quick and easy method or tool to tell us if a linking domain is good or spammy? I have incoming broken links from sites like these: www.webutation.net titlesaurus.com www.webstatsdomain.com www.ericksontribune.com www.addondashboard.com search.wiki.gov.cn www.mixeet.com dinasdesignsgraphics.com Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Which forum platform has the best "SEO Functionality"?
I have used vBulletin with vBSEO for a number of years and have been happy with the SEO results that I have achieved. However, vBulletin's recent releases have become unstable, full of bugs and are not secure. I am intending on starting some new forums in the near future and would like to move away from vBulletin. I have heard good things about Xenforo and IP Boards. Does anybody have any experience with either platforms built in SEO functionality?
Technical SEO | | statman870 -
Wordpress - Missing Meta Description and Title Elements Too Short
I have a wordpress site. When SeoMoz runs the crawl, my report shows 0 errors, but a lot of warnings in two areas: Missing Meta Description and Title Element Too Short. The only thing is, the URL's it shows under both of these categories look like this: http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/author/Michael/page/4/ http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/category/anxiety-panic/ http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/tag/goals/ These are tags, categories, and author pages. How do I hide these from being seen by SeoMoz and Google? I mean I should do that right? Because there is no way I can add a description to these pages, or extend the title - right? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | DallasBonsai0 -
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URL"
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URLs" but all the pages listed have a canonical with a static url , does this mean that I can ignore the warnings? Seems to me that I can but I just want to make sure?
Technical SEO | | Arnx1 -
Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0 -
Meta Title Keywords and Company name
Currently our meta title says "Network Security Audit | Pivot Point Security" which is pretty broad considering how many services we offer. In trying to restructure our keywords, marketing and SEO focus, I came up with a new title. The problem I have is figuring out which keywords to use in the title, and with a company name with 3 words - I am running out of room. The new title idea is "Information Security Assessments - Penetration Testing | Pivot Point Security" So my questions are the following. Do I need to put the company name? Should I choose different keywords? I'm sort of at a stand still trying to figure out the best possible title since meta keywords or description won't really help ranking.
Technical SEO | | pivotpointsecurity0 -
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 | | craigycraig0