Complicated Title Tag Issues. Experts, Please Help!

[Leowa]

Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I ask a question here so please forgive me if I miss any forum etiquette.

I am managing SEO for an educational site which is built in React Js, and so far much of the job has been keyword research and site optimization. The site still has slow PageSpeed though.

The Issues  - 4 weeks ago we published 20 or so content pieces, I had pre-prepared title tags and meta descriptions. But when we released the content there was a programming error that made all of the pages show another title tag for all 20 pages instead of the pre-prepared individual title tags.

I noticed this after 3 days and the issue was fixed within 6 days, but by then Google had crawled and indexed the pages. And now I can't get Google to change to the pre-prepared tags no matter what I do! I've tried changing the content, changing the URL of one of the pages, and I've sent Google spiders to re-crawl the pages multiple times.

The super weird thing is that the correct title tag shows in the 'navigation bar/tabs bar' on google chrome:

But NOT when I view the source code for the page:

Yesterday I was taking a walk in the park and I just couldn't stop thinking about it (it is really starting to get to me by now since nothing works), so I ran back home and looked closely at one of these pages in the Google search console. And I noticed something I hadn't seen before… BOTH of the title tags can be found in the HTML:

Pre-prepared title tag: <title></strong>UK Seat Belt & Car Seat Laws: The Definitive Guide<strong></title>

The other title tag (in src section): title=Ace%20The%20DMV%20Permit%20Test%20%26%20Get%20Your%20License

Could this be the problem or what do you think? I've understood that Google has automated title tags and that they can choose their own if they think it fits better, but the title tags aren't even close to describing the topic as it is now so it doesn’t make any sense.

All answers are greatly appreciated! Your advice is life-saving for a learner like me.

P.S. I love SEO but it can be very frustrating sometimes!

Thank you very much,

Leo

[Leowa]

Hi, I noticed that the images I added don't show. So to clarify:

The 'navigation bar' on google = the tabs-bar on the top of chrome

[RossKernez]

Hi there,

I had a similar problem at one of the client's websites. You must remove the second title from the page because Google is confused about which title is correct. It is possible that the first titles are dynamically generated by the script and they are being overwritten by the second titles or vice versa. By the way, this "%20" means space in a programming language.

Ross

[Leowa]

Hi Ross!

Thank you so much for your answer! I will try this immediately and let you know how it goes

Leo

[RossKernez]

Sounds good!

[seoelevated]

I also suggest to double check that the actual title tag (the first one you included in your post) is in the section of the page, and not the . And preferably high up in the section before any scripts or other elements which could take significant time to load. Check this in "view page source" and not just using the "inspect" function of the browser's dev tools, to ensure that some scripts on the page aren't altering the title tag after the document is loaded, since the search engines may instead use whatever is initially set in the actual of the document before scripts execute.

[Leowa]

Hi Seoelevated, thanks! It is in the section, but below google analytics and google tag manager scripts. Is that good enough? Although as it is right now the wrong title tag shows in the page source but we're implementing fixes according to the feedback from Ross (which will hopefully help!!)

[Everett]

Hi Leowa,

As long as it comes before you're fine.

[seoelevated]

Primarily, the requirement is to be in the section. However, I have seen cases where a long-load-time resource in the above meta tags can cause meta tags to be ignored. These were fairly extreme cases, where the resource took multiple seconds to load, synchronously. But moving the meta tags (and Title) above those resources fixed the issue. Also, in another case, we had a snippet from a CDN provider which included an iframe, and in that iframe there was a section and a closing . It turned out that Google was ignoring all of our tags after the which was injected in that iframe, even though it was only supposedly closing the section opened within the iframe. Once we moved that iframe to the end of our own section, below all our meta data, the issues resolved. So, with all that, I do recommend putting meta data at the top of the section, but depending on what else is in there, it might not be an issue for you.

[Leowa]

This could definitely be relevant to us as the pagespeed is slow when first entering the site (like 6-7 seconds...) and a lot of resources are loaded (primarily unnecesary JavaScript and render-blocking resources according to Lighthouse). We're working on the pagespeed but I'll pass on this info to the development team in the meantime. If the Ross fix doesn't work we'll put the tags as high up as possible in the .

Thanks a lot, seoelevated! You are an absolute champion!

P.S. We're also changing to nextJS  which, as I've understood, should solve a lot of JavaScript SEO issues.

[Leowa]

UPDATE: It worked!!!!!! I'm so freaking happy! Love you guys!