How do I combat title tag issues in Moz because of long company/site name? [Currently using Yoast SEO Plugin]

[giaciccone]

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?

[4RS_John]

I think you have a few options:

In the Titles & Metas section Yoast uses a sort of templating system. So if you go to the Post Types tab and remove %%sep%% and %%sitename%% from the Title Template under the "Posts" heading, (probably the first one), you'll be removing the "| Parker Staffing Services" from all of your Posts. You can do the same for Pages, Media, and any Custom Post Types you have installed on that tab.

The other tabs are similar. Taxonomies is just a scary word for Categories, Tags, and things that behave like categories & tags, and has nothing to do with stuffed animals like it looks like. If you go that tab you'll see a lot of the Title Templates end in %%sep%% %%sitename%% so you can remove those as well, if you want. That'll take the "| Parker Staffing Services" off of the Tag & Category archive pages, (pages like example.com/category/new-staff). The Archives tab works the same way. If you're worried about messing things up, a quick hack is to take a screenshot before changing anything, or do a database backup.

You can also override these templates on a per-post/page/CPT basis using Yoast SEO metabox, (that's what WP calls the boxes in the admin), on the Edit Post/Page/CPT screen in the admin. The Yoast SEO metabox is usually right below the box you write your actual content in, but it may be forced down depending on what plugins you have installed. If you don't see it at all click the "Screen Options" tab in the top right of the screen, it'll slide down and show you a bunch of checkboxes, where you should be able to make the Yoast SEO metabox visible. In the Yoast SEO metabox, click the title in the Snippet Preview, and the snippet editor will magically appear, letting you edit the title tag & meta description for that page only.

Hopefully that helps.

[netzkern_AG]

You can also very likely change this directly in the wordpress settings without fiddling around in plugins. Normally this Suffix comes from the "website name" you enter in "Settings" > "Tagline".

Many people tend to enter the whole, long name of their business here, which is quite commonly very, very long and thus exceeds the displayed title limit.

Nico

[giaciccone]

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?

[giaciccone]

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!

[4RS_John]

I'm a bit surprised that the override in the metabox isn't being respected 100%, but I haven't played with the manual overrides much. Are you using a full-page caching plugin, like WP Super-Cache? If so you might have to clear the cache's contents to see the changes.

I think the problem should go away because you edited the Titles & Meta settings, but you can check right away. Do you know how to read HTML, at least sort of? Look at the page's source, (in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source), and look to see what's between the <title>and</title> tags - they will be fairly near the top, (you can Ctrl+F in View Source to find them). That's the title tag that we're trying to change, so if "| Parker Staffing Services" is gone, Moz, (and maybe Google), will be happy, then it's just a case of waiting for Moz & Google to re-crawl your site to see the changes.

If that doesn't work, and you don't want to set the site name to something shorter, there's a way to do it with PHP. I believe Yoast SEO passes the title tag through a WordPress filter before outputting it to the page. You can hook on to that filter and replace "| Parker Staffing Services" with an empty string. This is a bit overkill, though - you should be able to solve the problem in the admin interface.

[giaciccone]

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.

[4RS_John]

I guess we should check the obvious - go to yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles - that's the first tab of Titles & Meta - is the Force Rewrite set to enabled? (it looks like the purple background means enabled - it's a kind of confusing colour choice).

Failing that, are there other caches that might need to be busted? An easy way to check would be to edit the title of a post or page - add an exclamation mark or something, save, and check the source. If the exclamation mark is there then it's not a cache problem. If it's not then look for caches elsewhere. Other caches might be:

• other caching plugins, (W3 Total Cache, WP-Rocket, Something else).
• Varnish, or some other whole-page cache active on your server outside of WordPress.
• CloudFlare, if it is caching everything, including the HTML.

[giaciccone]

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

[giaciccone]

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!

[4RS_John]

Try enabling it. I think that if it's disabled, Yoast SEO won't do anything to your title tags, so they'll just be the WordPress default, which is usually "Postname | Sitename." My hunch is that enabling that setting will put Yoast to work and both your settings in Titles & Metas will be respected, and your overrides in the metabox will be as well.

Once it's enabled check the source again, you'll know right away, (before Google or Moz has a chance to get in there and punish you if it's the wrong thing to do).

[giaciccone]

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!

[4RS_John]

No problem! I guess I my lesson should be to always start by making sure whatever we're troubleshooting is on

[giaciccone]

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!

[4RS_John]

Just realized I never answered the question about the title tag appearing further down - I think this is normal. Yoast SEO tries to put all it's output in the head together, and it's usually near the end of the section, so it's suppressing WP's default <title>tag higher up, then spitting out a new one down lower. My understanding is that the position of the <title> has no effect on SEO.</p></title>