Hello!
Google will append the site name for you if you don’t supply it yourself. It’s why we added so many warnings about this in TSF v4.0, because they’re doing it stringently nowadays, leading to unexpected results like what you’re seeing.
Not adding your brand name is seen as deception: You’re hiding your identity. So, Google takes over and uncovers it with data found elsewhere (headers, links, structured data, other pages, etc.).
See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624#page-titles.
There, they explain you must brand your titles, and that Google will replace titles when they think what’s supplied is not helpful enough for the search engine user.
I hope this explains the behavior you’re observing. Cheers!
Thank you for your reply. The problem is that the site in the subdirectory has a different “brand” than the main site.
I’m not hiding anything — what’s deceptive is to include the my site’s name in the page titles for the other site which is located in a subdirectory. They have nothing to do with each other.
The site in the subdirectory already has its own name in the titles. So, the current titles for that site are: Page Title –> Subdirectory Site Name –> My Site Name. That’s not right as they are separate sites, sharing only webspace.
My site is a large, current, thriving magazine with a large readership. The subdirectory site is a small, rather primitive html-based, long-archived (over 10 years) art site with a completely different owner. (Back in 2001 I just gave a friend some disk space to play with and that’s what he built.) It has nothing to do with my own site, yet my site’s name has recently appeared on his pages.
If there is some way to remove my site’s title from the other site’s pages, I’d sure like to do it.
Hi again!
I understand your frustration. And it looks like you took my statement personally, that wasn’t my intention! 🙁
I meant to convey that Google has been forced to make choices to go against the many nefarious actors on the web, those whom use many tricks to deceive and scam people. In effect, it’s a buck-shot that also hits good-willing people.
For example, Register with PayPal becomes Register with PayPal - ScamPal. I think you’d be happy they warned you in time 🙂
Alas, A good story becomes A good story - Unwanted Title, and that’s an unfortunate side-effect.
To further clarify, in the eyes of Google, a subdirectory is part of the main domain. So, to them, both sites are part of one big thing, and the main site’s name will be appended. So, you’ll have to find a way to separate the sites.
You could work around this by creating a subdomain–but even that isn’t always as successful. The surefire way to mitigate the issue is to set up the site on a different domain name.
I hope this information is helpful! Have a nice weekend!
