Google adding text to SERP title which isn't relevant

[mattpettitt]

Hi guys,

I have a site with around 300 articles on it and these articles came from three old domains which were migrated during a Wordpress domain migration almost four months back. There

The problem I'm having is that for quite a lot of the articles in the SERP, Google is adding '- Maine Coons' to the end of the title. One of our old domains was related to this breed of cat so at least in Google's eyes it must have something to do with this I guess. I've attached a screenshot that shows one such example. What's odd is a lot of the new content that has been created also has this suffix added and it doesn't show in any other search engine.

So, it doesn't appear in other search engines and it's not coming from the article itself (proved also via developer tools inspecting the code).  So, Google is adding it but as you can see in this example (there are many more) it has absolutely no relevance to the post.

Has anyone seen this behavior or have any idea how to fix it? I've tried all kinds of things and have even hired SEO 'experts' that haven't been able to see any problems. Any clues?

Thanks,

Matt

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[mattpettitt]

Hey guys, I hate to 'bounce' but just wanted to add that all the pages that have this suffix of '- Maine Coons' don't have the same problem in any other search engine, it's just Google - which is the one that counts of course! I've tried editing the articles in question but most don't even reference 'Maine Coons' anywhere in the article so I really have no idea why Google is adding this. Any pointers appreciated!

Also, the suffix can appear on the mobile SERP results but not on the desktop SERP results.

Also, another thing that Google seems to do strange with our site - if you type in our domain (petskb) it doesn't come up anywhere in the SERP.  If you type our previous domains in, it's right at the top.

[mattpettitt]

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for taking the time to investigate and also to respond.

The site title has no reference to 'Maine Coons' - also, I used phpmyadmin to search the whole database for any reference to 'Maine Coons' outside of articles and there are none.  I also used Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to see if anything stood out but not a thing. For some reason, Google is adding this to some posts, but not others.

I think the thing that is telling is that the other search engines aren't doing it, which tell me that forever reason, Google is adding it.

Any further direction appreciated!

Thanks,

Matt

[pilesofpillows]

Very odd, I have looked into this a little bit and it looks like you have a Wordpress website, I would recommend you check your "Site Title" and all schema code you have to make sure there is nothing that says your organization name is Maine Coon. If you or the developer you mentioned have already done this, you may try deleting and then re-adding your sitemap in Google Search Console. If none of this works you may try slightly editing the page's Meta Title and then requested Google re-crawl and re-index that specific URL via the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.