Meta Title Issues - Google Creating Own Nonsense.

I know there is plenty of crap on Google about this. I'm wondering if anyone has any added advice. I'm at the point where I am considering stripping everything out of my site and pasting it into a fresh install.

Basically Google takes a set of words (relevant to my homepage) and adds it at the end of every meta title of every page and post.

1.) My meta titles are not too long.
2.) The words it adds are not the site title, not even visible in the source code for any given page on the site. It would appear the exact phrase is not used on the site.
3 ) This has happened before and resolved back to normal.
4.) When it happens it completely obliterates my rankings.

I have quite a lot of useless plugins on this site. Things added things removed things not wanted

The only thing I can think of around this is to copy and paste to a fresh install and this probably sounds stupid and useless to people but I don't see any other idea to get rid of this joke situation

Can you post or pm the words/phrase and homepage?

Or (if not comfortable) say where they are pulling it from......title? description? heading? in content/paragraph?


"This has happened before and resolved back to normal." Suggests nothing actually causing it from within the site, and suggests heavily that they are testing it to see searchers response(s).

PS I might know something to try, but need to know what and where it's coming from to get some idea of whether it has a chance.

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Originally Posted by chaumi

Can you post or pm the words/phrase and homepage?

Or (if not comfortable) say where they are pulling it from......title? description? heading? in content/paragraph?


"This has happened before and resolved back to normal." Suggests nothing actually causing it from within the site, and suggests heavily that they are testing it to see searchers response(s).

PS I might know something to try, but need to know what and where it's coming from to get some idea of whether it has a chance.

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Thanks, I do not want to publicly or privately out my site or niche. The words it adds are literally not in my site as a title, site title, site slogan, icon name, logo name. It is only relevant to my homepage. Yet the phrase does not exist there. I can search my site and find nothing that is an exact match of this phrase. It is beyond idiotic of where Google is pulling it from or why it adds it to all pages and posts. There is simply no explanation. I've shortened all meta titles to try and get rid of this issue. Yet now I'm left with short meta titles and still this dumb phrase added. The phrase is relevant to my homepage but I simply see the exact phrase used nowhere.

I'm not a WordPress master, nor am I some simpleton who knows nothing about WordPress. This issue is now way beyond stupidity. I simply do not accept it is just Google that is deciding upon this.

To give you an example. If my domain was "online slots . Com". It adds to the end of every single meta - "the best online slots" whereas not one is "the best online slots" mentioned once in my content, title, meta description, slogan, site name, any plugin, not in schema, not any single place. I renamed my site title and slogan to something that would be more fitting but still 8 weeks on my ranks continue to drop as Google insists on adding this irrelevant nonsense to everything.

OK in this case my idea wouldn't work - it involves a way to stop Google pulling content off a page into the SERPs.

The only other thing I can think of (given it's not being pulled off the site from anything obvious) is that maybe there's some highish authority reference to the site somewhere externally (maybe links/anchor text) that they are giving (extreme) weight to for some reason.

Another idea...highly unlikely I think.....but if you had something wrong in robots.txt, that might force G to use descriptive info from elsewhere.


...and a bunch of people posting here with what seems like similar problems. Don't seem to be any responses so debatably not worth posting...but then again, maybe John Mueller is actually reading them....

https://support.google.com/webmaster...search-results

You mentioned having useless plugins on the site after removing them.

Some plugins do leave a lot of traces in the database, altho most should not affect any content that is shown to the bots/visitors. Taking a look at the database in workbench or phpmyadmin might help determine of anything is left over.

If you feel you have issues slightly related to removed plugins, moving to a few install might work, but if there are leftover tables or references to them in the database you will likely just migrate them also.

If the plugins are completely uninstalled and there are no db references to them, just delete the folders for them (after a backup obviously).

Could also be that it is using a title from a page from a similar site, either in niche or with a somewhat similar domain name, and as you said, it will clear up eventually.

Rick
Universal4

I don't know what your level of experience is with WP (master/simpleton - doesn't explain much), hence security comes to mind. Maybe it's not a plugin, instead, maybe you've been hacked. Do you have a backup of your database and site, before all this title drama started?

If you do, this is where I'd start first. Before going to all that work of reestablishing you broken-site.

Easier to do it on you local machine, but if your not savvy with all this then, set it up as a test on your current hosting solution (whatever that is). If you unsure how to do all this, send me a PM and I'll run through the steps with you ;)

Maybe an SEO plugin issue?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by universal4

If you feel you have issues slightly related to removed plugins, moving to a few install might work, but if there are leftover tables or references to them in the database you will likely just migrate them also.

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The site is not much more than 100 pages. By fresh install I was thinking of a fresh install, different theme and copying and pasting the content in. So as to avoid taking any junk via a fresh install and importing the database. I am not 100% it will make any difference though.

I think what I possibly did at some point is change from Rank Math to Yoast. I know I did use Rank Math on one site and did not like it and got rid of it.

Do you know where I would have to look for any traces of Rank Math?

Don't know where to look (other than to just go through all files), or more to the point precisely what I would be looking for, but this may help..........

https://rankmath.com/kb/uninstall/

There is a section half way down,.....Completely Removing Rank Math’s Data

Advanced DB Cleaner would get the job done easily too. You can go one by one and remove anything you don't like or don't recognize.

chaumi has good advice there and your mention of changing from rankmath to yoast is the exact scenario that I was assuming could have been happening.

Using plugins to clean up other plugins is last on my list unless absolutely necessary. If one does not have direct access to the database (such as with workbench or phpmyadmin) then a plugin might be the answer.

If the decision is reached to start with a new install and copying and pasting all the content in can certainly be a solution, but the larger the site gets the harder all of that becomes.

Interested in what the ultimate solution you decide to go with so let us know.

Rick
Universal4

A bit of extra reading.....

rankmath files (according to their documentation) go in the WP-content folder. In theory you should be able to easily get to this via hosting control panel. Highlight the offending file ( if there is one) and delete. Supposedly they will clearly be marked ‘rankmath’.

this plugin theory does have some logical backing. You’d have to be thinking that both RM and Yoast let you play with titles, hence if something was left in by RM, then it could be playing a part. I guess you couldn’t rule out some sort of corruption between the two.

I don’t get it though. Wouldn’t bet my life on it, but from everything I know, search engines read (and react to) page level code. So that should be what you see in page source code. If you can’t see the offending phrase just by viewing page source, then in theory it isn’t there and hence they’re not pulling it from the site.

Just for reference, Google has been testing their own titles in the SERPs for quite a while. It's not necessarily something on your end.

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Originally Posted by potentialeight

Just for reference, Google has been testing their own titles in the SERPs for quite a while. It's not necessarily something on your end.

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Yep, see quite a lot of titles being replaced by H1 content instead at present.

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Originally Posted by mickyfu

Do you know where I would have to look for any traces of Rank Math?

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WP stores data? In the database. Hence, best to manually go through your database, via phpMyAdmin (cpanel). If your using Plesk: Tools & Settings > Database Servers.

Yes you could use a plugin BUT far better to do everything manually. Unless you want to risk more drama, than your already in!

Again if you need help, PM me ;)

A longshot idea.....

Take the term/phrase abcdefg hijk lmnop ...combine it with site URL

So ...................abcdefg hijk lmnop www website.com

Go search this in Google. If there is some authoritative site somewhere (other than your own) that somehow they are using as a resource to associate the words with the site, it may show up in the results and give you a clue.

I had also suffered from this a couple of times. Some of my pages on search results had completely random titles that didn't reflect wat those pages were about.
It did resolve itself eventually and I don't know whether it naturally happened or I had to do something with that, but here's what I did:
- I had a "seo" plugin, that generated titles (on the tool they were as I wanted to have them), so I disabled that feature and did it manually.
- Manually added custom schema where "name" is defined as my desired title.
- Updated the page structure and changed the parts, which (I thought) might have had something to do with the randomly constructed title.

Shortly after I did the above - my titles showed up in the expected manner. Although it is really not clear whether what i did actually had an affect or it was related to something completely unrelated.