Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?

JasonDGreat

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/

MaeM3.png TLcD8.png

JasonDGreat

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!

RobertFisher

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

ShaMenz

Thanks Alan,

I like a little mystery hunt

AlanMosley

Well picked up Sha.

impressed with you level of detail.

ShaMenz

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:

Info No Character encoding declared at document level

No character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML meta element 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

JasonDGreat

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.

JasonDGreat

Thanks for accessing the site. I hope the next crawl, which will be next week, will be good. Will update you guys.

KeriMorgret

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.

AlanMosley

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.

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Moz Q&A is closed.

Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?

Got a burning SEO question?

Browse Questions

Explore more categories

Related Questions

SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"

"5XX (Server Error)" - How can I fix this?

Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles

Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google

"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?

Special Characters in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.

Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important?