graemeblake

I’ve included some screenshots below. Some posts will display different titles depending on what was searched. I don’t know which title tag Google is using to give the page an SEO grade.

The page has this title:

“LSAT 69, Reading Comprehension, Passage 1, Small Farms”

That’s too wide to display in the snippet. So, if there are no keywords, Google displays a shorter title, that looks like it was generated by Yoast, because it includes my sitename

With no keywords entered: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dfsezsxy4r7bov2/Title%20was%20too%20long.png

With keywords, part of the longer title is displayed:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2htelbx7v4eeopd/Title%20with%20Keywords.png

Going forward, I’m just going to use shorter titles. But, do you have any insight into what’s going on here, and do you know which title Google would use for SEO purposes?

jrf, I figured out what was going on with the titles.

They’re under 70 characters. However, the SERP snippet has a width limit, not a character limit.

So some of the titles were too wide. Rather than allow them to be truncated, the plugin displayed another, shorter title to Google.

However, if I search for terms specifically in the longer title, a longer title gets displayed in Google.

I’m a little confused on the specifics. Not sure if the plugin sent two titles to Google, and Google accepted both, then decided what to display based on search query.

Also unsure which title tag is being used for on-page SEO calculations by Google.

All the less wide titles display just fine. Hope that all makes sense.

Ok, I can see the snippets again. Some show caption, some don’t.

Also, some of the titles do not correctly appear in search results. When I view source on the page, the Plugin’s title it within the <title> tags, but Google doesn’t always use that title.

Here are the screenshots.

First one: Has caption, title didn’t work

Google: https://www.dropbox.com/s/opwv7gdineukq6p/1%20With%20Caption%2C%20improper%20title.png
Plugin: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4l30nu6gzaewfh/Snipper%20Preview%201.png

Second one: no caption (which is good), title works

Google:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/77adgqv2i86u5z7/2%20-%20no%20caption%20proper%20title.png
Plugin:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5devyjk31o1rpac/Snippet%20Preview%202.png

Well, the Yoast preview isn’t accurate for how Google typically displays the post. But everything displays in google fine. Yoast inaccurately includes the caption.

Distiple, is the image filename appearing in Google’s results as well? My site isn’t indexed yet so I can’t check.

It turned out chrome had cached my old stylesheet. Oops. It works.