Author Byline in Page Title in SERP

[davidkaralisjr]

I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick?

We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high

csvmF

[DmitriiK]

Well, My thinking is that for whatever reason Google thinks that the title has to be longer than suggested by that plugin and for whatever reason is pulling the authors name. The only way I see something changing is too make title longer or remove/rename author.

[davidkaralisjr]

Interesting, I never really considered Sailthru - which we use for a variety of functionality and CRM - to impact how the pages show up in SERPs. I did a search in Google News for "leafly cannabis" and I'm still finding this page to be the only one showing up with the name being pulled into the SERP title. It won't let me post this as an image attachment for some reason, but here's a screenshot of the first page, which also includes shorter titles that aren't having this issue (http://imgur.com/a/pGhdZ). I've looked at this specific page up and down and can't really find any other reason than that for the issue.

Thanks for taking a look!

[DmitriiK]

Ok, Now I see it. I didn't understand you were searching in News section. And here is the reason why it comes up like that - you are using some type of plugin called "Sailthru Horizon" and you have a title setup there as "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You" and author specified as Patrick Bennett. It's very typical for google to pull such info for News section. Basically it's like twitter card. So, try changing the title to longer one.

[davidkaralisjr]

Thank you for your response!

I'm using anything from "how to find best high," "best hight," and anything else I can think of that triggers it in the News results. And it's still showing up with "Patrick" in the title for all of them. I've also tested in Chrome Incognito mode, Safari private browser, and just a Google search on my logged in Chrome browser.

It's definitely keeping me stumped >__<

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

For me tit comes up without Patrick, like this: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You | Leafly", which matches your page title.

The titles displayed in search are created automatically based on query. The only way to influence it is to have explicitly set <title>tag, which you do. So, if it still shows up with patrick to you, try different browser, in incognito mode. See if it's the same. if it is - post the query you are searching.</p></title>