I am having the exact same problem. (See: http://www.prayersandapples.com) The top of my screen says “Prayers and Apples Prayers and Apples” although I entered was ONE “Prayers and Apples.” I’ve deleted %%sitename%% from the end of every box I have an option to edit, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Yup, removing %%sitename%% in plugin settings didn’t help here either…
The most weird thing is that it behaves in a different way depending on the theme as per my description above.
Another thing. Seems this has started happening after the recent plugin update, but downgrading doesn’t solve the problem.
Just made a few more tests. This is getting crazy 🙂
OK, on my ‘clean’ site I switched from Twenty Eleven to Twenty Ten – no difference.
Then I switched to Twenty Twelve – whoa, everything works as it should!
Switched again to Twenty Eleven. Guess what? NOW it also works OK! Switched to Twenty Ten – surprise-surprise, it also WORKS!
So now it works well with all 3 themes on my ‘clean’ site.
Got back to my production site.
Switched to Twenty Ten – no difference, same bugs.
Switched to Twenty Eleven – it works OK. Added Twenty Twelve – works OK too.
Back to Twenty Ten – NOW it works OK!
Switched to my custom theme – same bugs…
Magically, with all Twenty-something themes it just started working well, but not with my custom theme.
WP Codex rules 🙂
The wp_title() function should not be used by a theme in conjunction with other strings or functions (like concocting with bloginfo(‘name’) ) to set the title because it will render plugins unable to rewrite page titles correctly.
This is exactly what my custom theme had:
<?php wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?>
and right after:
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
So check if your header.php has this and remove the 2nd string.
Thank you, that worked! What are your thoughts on going back and re-adding %%sitename%% in plug-in settings? Should I just leave that alone, now that I’ve deleted it and edited my header.php, and if I want a search engine to pull a title that has my website name in it (i.e., “About Me: Prayers and Apples” versus “About Me”) just manually enter the title I want (“About Me: Prayers and Apples”) in the SEO Title box under the individual post (on the screen where you edit posts, enter focus words for that post, etc.)?
I added %%sitename%% back in plugin settings and it all works fine for me.
