Changes to title and description not appearing in Google search...

[keeot]

www.heatwavemedia.com

Search terms: san francisco video production, san francisco video production services

In Google search site appears as "Heartwave Media: San Francisco Video Production Services"

but I'm sure I've never used a colon in all my iterations of the title...

Instead it reads "San Francisco Video Production Services | Heartwave Media"

with the description "A San Francisco video production company specializing in creative corporate and commercial video services."

But that's not coming up either...

I'm on Wordpress and am using All in One SEO if that helps...

Thoughts?

[Alex-Harford]

Google have been adding brand names with a colon to the start of some title tags for a while now (2+ years I think), along with other title changes.

They don't always show your chosen meta description either, especially if it's not considered to match the searcher's intent. However, I've just looked at the source code of your homepage and there's no meta description there.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en "...we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."

P.S. While looking at your site I noticed a 404 error resulted in a page full of adverts with no relation to your content, so that might be something you want to check out.

[Travis_Bailey]

I don't want to give anyone a heart attack, but the Avada theme looks like it has a lot of vulnerabilities. I'll run a scan in a minute, but would you duplicate (shorten) and shoot over the URL?

[Travis_Bailey]

Alex had the best answer to your question. Just as an aside, you really want to update All in One. There's an XSS vulnerability. Also, the instagram plugin uses an outdated version of prettyPhoto which is also vulnerable. You could wake up tomorrow and find the SRC steeped in Cyrillic.

I wasn't able to duplicate what Alex mentioned, with the ads and all. The above is just something to keep in mind.

[keeot]

What?  ads?  Have I been hacked?  Where do you see this?

[keeot]

I have the latest version of All in One.  Or am missing something?

[Travis_Bailey]

I can't seem to reproduce the same results Alex is talking about. But at the time of posting, according to WPScan, it appears your All in One SEO plugin is slightly out of date.

Though I would be more concerned with the Instagram plugin that uses a vulnerable version of prettyPhoto.

I've seen prettyPhoto exploits before, but I don't see anything out of the ordinary. Just make sure to cover that base as soon as possible.

***Actually it appears your All in One plugin is up to date. I'm in about 10 different places.

[Alex-Harford]

It doesn't look serious, just something your domain registrar/host implements - you need to set a custom 404 page to remove it. Type www.heatwavemedia.com/ with a couple of additional characters to the URL and you'll see.

[Travis_Bailey]

Oh, I see what happened. The domain was misspelled initially. I found the right site with intitle operator. I was a little confused about the difference in geographic targeting. San Francisco not being in Florida and all. ; )

But it still holds that the instagram plugin uses a vulnerable version of prettyPhoto. It's a great idea to see if there's an update, or you'll definitely want to consider a replacement.