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That's a good question. I'm not surprised that your client really loves the good ol' "listicle" approach, a la Buzzfeed & the like. The listicle was ~the~ thing to do in 2015/2016, it seems! I almost think that "Violin Teachers, Tutors" seems _kind of, slightly _keyword stuffy. I'd encourage you to instead place one of those two words (teacher vs tutor) in the meta description to make the title tighter & cleaner if you go with your preferred title.

I say this because I try to remember to cater to my searcher/user first & foremost with compelling titles & descriptions, while still giving nods to Google with proper practices. However... When in doubt, consider A/B Testing with your different locations to see which performs best! Good luck!

Agreed. ^

Like I said, you have the option to manually put your site name (icesurfing.com) at the end of every title in Yoast - so that Yoast actually counts it when giving you a red, yellow, green analysis for each page/post. There is a way to turn off the automatic feature (which, if automatic, Yoast will not count it, dinging you for not having your keyword in the title, despite the fact that once it's published, it actually will be). I hope that makes sense?

I've had a similar scenario with Yoast - re: adding the site name (in this case, site URL) to the title automatically, but not really registering that fact when you use the plug-in on each page/post.

If it were me, I'd advise against 2, because you're right, it does look kind of redundant & spammy. OR, if you want, you can turn the setting off that automatically adds the site name at the end of every single one of your titles, and then just add it manually so that Yoast does register it. In WP, these settings can be found in the Titles & Metas section of your Yoast SEO plugin (accessible from the menu on the left, right under SEO's dashboard).

I hope that helps!

I saw an interesting article from Razorlight Media about this topic a couple of months ago. I've linked it here for you, as it might show some kind of evidence regarding how Google treats post dates with a real-world example.

Honestly though, I've found that if the content is good, has a high DA, and is consistently receiving traffic, it shouldn't be an issue. That being said, is there anything you can do to update your material that would warrant an updated date (without affecting the URL, of course)? That might be something you want to consider to show other readers that its still extremely relevant material and is regularly updated.

Not at all! I think this ultimately should've led to me reading things a little more clearly. I really do appreciate all of your help. Thank you again!

I think you just solved my problem.

Though the title tag appears much further down in the code than it did before - is this normal? Either way, I think it will accept my new code.

You are a certified life saver. Thank you so so much!

I just added the exclamation point... and it showed up in the title code immediately after, so I don't think it's a cache issue, sadly. If only!

Looks like it is disabled. That's the way it should be though, correct?

I am also surprised about the override not being respected, because I've used the Yoast plugin to create custom titles on websites for former employers & have never experienced this issue. To my knowledge, I don't believe we are using WP Super-Cache. I don't see it in our plugin list, nor do I see it when I conduct a search on the admin panel.

I just took a look at the source code for a couple of our blog posts & it appears to still be there. AUGH! This is very frustrating.

Nico - how funny, that's my brother's name

I am thinking this might be my last resort option because it might be a hard sell to our executive team; however, if this ends up being the only way to fix my issue, I think we'll have to at least try.

Thank you!

Hi there! Thanks for responding to my question

So, I went ahead & took off the %%sep%% %%sitename%% pieces of the templates in the Titles & Metas section in the Yoast plugin settings.

In response to the override using the metabox, that's actually the process I have been doing, creating my own title without the "| Parker Staffing Services" at the end for each individual page on my site, but it's automatically added without my knowledge - and I only find out about it when I see the errors pop up in my weekly Moz Site Crawl. As you can imagine, it's frustrating because so much of my time is being spent updating meta data only for it to stay the same.

Do you think that because I edited the Titles & Meta settings that this problem will go away? Or are they not completely correlated?

I've only just started to dip my toe into the SEO pool, so please forgive me if this is a silly question.

I've been working heavily in the Moz tool and the Yoast SEO plugin to clean up the meta descriptions on our site, as there were many pages without descriptions in place (we just transferred from a different CMS to Wordpress within the last month or so). Now I'm noticing on our Site Crawl that we have 60+ pages that have title elements that are considered too long. When I go in to fix these issues on our blog posts (as this is where most of the issues lie), Yoast is already giving me the green light on the title lengths.

I've discovered that the reason why Moz is telling us that many of our site lengths are too long is because "| Parker Staffing Services" is added to the end of our title tags automatically.

Deep breath Now that you've heard all of the backstory... Is there a way that I can prevent that site title (which is 26 characters all by itself! Talk about limiting!) from displaying on search engines when our blog posts or pages show up in search results?

I've poked around in the Titles & Metas settings that come with Yoast, but I fear making too many changes will result in me screwing something up.

Help an SEO beginner out?