Totally confused by titles being too long!
-
We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past. In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins.
Do I need to go through and change all those titles? How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long? Some are too long only in the archive link...
So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts! Thanks y'all!
-
I have a similar problem but just a mere 500 extra long links. I have whittled 1,148 broken links down to 22 and aiming for zero.
With the titles too long do I need to worry where I have linked out to other sites in a post that that might create new broken links or are there other things I should consider?
I always understood that I could fill that title bar and there would not be a problem. On examining the offending links I see that as the domain name has 32 characters from the first www to the m in .com which when prefaced with http:// and the title in the tilte bar creats a huge url. (I know the domain length is pushing it and know about the number of characters for Adwords)
So I just change the title in Yoast and don't bother about the title at the top of the page and the prermalink that was originally created?
I will do whatever it takes to clear up the problems but would like to sort the title links in one hit as I go through page by page.
Your advice would be appreciated.
-
I want to say Dana is right Yoast will wright the title in a search engine friendly manner
Thomas
-
Dana, it definitely helps! The bigger problem is that with the plug-ins, I can't exactly tell what is too long. Is it the link for the page or what Wordpress considers the title line?
-
Chances are your Titles were being automatically constructed using the Titles of your posts. Yes, you will probably have to go back through and do proper titles for each one so that they don't exceed character lengths in Google and other search engines, but, take heart, it will be worth it. Right now the search engines are either making up their own titles or using truncated versions of your longer titles.
Take the time, go through and write really great titles for those 2,000 posts. It'll benefit you SEO. Don't worry, 2,000 titles really isn't and insurmountable task. You don't need to rework every page, just add titles of the proper length using a plug-in like Yoast. If you do ten a day you can have it done in a month.
Hope that helps a little!
Dana
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google confused by trailing slash
My client has a page with the URL https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/. Google won't index this page because it has detected a canonical at https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training (without the trailing slash). I can't find https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training without the trailing slash anywhere in our site. All the other page URLs end with the slash. How do I sort this out and convince Google that https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/ is the version to index? Thanks in advance for your help, SEO masters! -AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Duplicate Title Tags How harmful is it?
I recently updated a site to use a new WordPress theme. This theme in conjunction with Yoast SEO plugin is causing duplicate Title tags. The tags have the same title in them. I discovered this when adding new keywords and pages to the page optimizer in moz. I have since turned off moz to stop the duplicate title tag issue however I am wondering if tuning off yoast is worse then the duplicate title tags. Any clarification on the duplicate page title issue and its consequences would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Duplicate Title tags vs. View All for search results
I run a directory and some search queries give almost 1000 unique results. My moz campaign tells me that I have around 1,300 duplicate title tags etc. I read online about canonical, rel=next/prev, also about having a 'view all' page just for google (page links, not search queries), but if I do this, wouldn't the slowness mean google won't index it? So the question is what is the best thing to do?
Technical SEO | | tguide0 -
Duplicate Page Title Crawl Error Issue
In the last crawl for on of our client websites the duplicate page title and page content numbers were very high. They are reading every page twice. http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com and http://barefootparadisevacations.com are being read as two different pages with the same page title. After the last crawl I used our built in redirect tool to redirect the urls, but the most recent crawl showed the same issue. Is this issue really hurting our rankings and if so, any suggestions on a fix for the problem? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | LoveMyPugs0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Is it possible to change a sitelink title by off page SEO?
Hi all, I checked a website of my company: sitelinks in SERP are with the correct url, but one of the sitelinks’ title is completely irrelevant. Is it possible that it was changed from "outside"? Or maybe it's a bug? Thank you, Imre
Technical SEO | | DDL0 -
Title Missing: Page is an Action
I have a page that has a missing Title Tag. I had a look at the page and it looks like an action, this is part of th cart. http://mydomainxyz.com/billing/status/index.php?action=phpinfo Is this a problem? How dod i deal with this?
Technical SEO | | stefanok0 -
Duplicate Page Title
The crawl of my website http://www.aboutaburningfire.com revealed an error showing a duplicate page title. Can someone please explain to me how to fix this? I'm not sure what it means or how to fix it. | House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/ 1 Pending Pending House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/index.html |
Technical SEO | | severity0