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

[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>