Google Caching Weird Post Titles – PLEASE HELP

Bumps deleted – It’s US Thanksgiving, staffing in the volunteer forums is low.

Do you have a Google Webmasters account and have you requested a re-submission of your site to see if it picks it up correctly?

Yeah, I’ve also been creating new posts every time I change something and waiting to see if the titles come out correctly when Google caches them

Without seeing your site and knowing what plugins you’re running, AND what search strings are coming up weird, the best I can say is this “You configured all in one SEO wrong.”

Have you tried fetching the page in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure the title Google is retrieving is exactly what you have entered?

Look under the diagnostics tab to do this.

I dont think so. I configured all-in-one seo the same exact way I configured my other sites and they are fine. I even tried deleting all-in-one-seo and using headspace. I deleted all the plugins expect for XML sitemaps and tried making new posts but when Google caches them they still come out the same way. Ive tried switching themes, I’ve tried reinstalling wordpress. Ive tried downgrading from wordpress 3.2.1 to 3.1. Logically this just doesnt make any sense. I know some php but I dont know how wordpress works… is it possible that the default theme that comes with wordpress is appending something to a .php file, like the functions file thats causing this? something like a filter that for some reason is appending “Comments for [domain]” onto the title? However when you look at the title in the source code it looks perfect, Google is just seeing something different and I dont know where theyre getting it. Any hypothetical reasons you can think of that could be causing this? Thanks

the site is dontbuystupid.com. If you look at the titles in the source code (they are correct) they come out a lot different than any of the post titles that Google caches. page titles dont seem to have a problem

Google gets its data for caching from your site, so the vectors are few here.

1) WordPress is doing it – Unlikely as the rest of us would have this problem ??

2) Your theme is doing it – Possible

3) A plugin is doing it – Possible

2 and 3 are most likely, however I did a quick search for “Canon PIXMA MP495 – The Truth About the Canon PIXMA MP495”

And https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Canon+PIXMA+MP495+%E2%80%93+The+Truth+About+the+Canon+PIXMA+MP495 shows your site, correctly, as the 5th item.

i didnt think wordpress was the issue. i thought it could have been a plugin that didnt fully function correctly with the newer version of wordpress. …which is why i tried going back to the older version.

The problem with that is Google has to re-cache to see it so it’s hard to reproduce.

I didn’t see anything unexpected with the search I did. Can you link to one showing the problem?

thanks revium, ill try that.

Ipstenu, I made new posts everytime I changed something to see if Google cached the right titles with the new post. But I see what you mean now about the right titles coming up – When I search for “dontbuystupid.com” almost everything that comes up is wrong, its all in that format [keyword] – Comments for [domain]. ie. After searching for dontbuystupid.com the first thing that came up was “Epson WorkForce 520 – Comments for DontBuyStupid.com” but then I tried searching for “epson workforce 520 – the truth about the epson workforce 520” and the page came up with the right titles somewhere down the page!! It looks like Google is caching 2 different pages for each of my posts or something. Have you guys heard of this happening or do you know how to fix it? Thanks

Figured it out. So i looked at the source code of the 2 cached pages and put them in an external diff program to see what was different about them that I could have been missing. The one with correct titles had some strange inline css styling applied to various tags and the one with bad titles did not have the strange inline css styling. So I thought it must be somethign to do with the theme thats producing 2 different posts for each post that I make. So I deleted all the files for that theme I was using and i reinstalled the original untouched theme and made a new post, waited for it to be cached, and it came out right! Its a little confusing as to why it worked because I had tried out different themes thinking it could have been the theme that was causing it and it was still producing 2 posts.