My name added to every Title

  • Resolved dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)


    3 years, 8 months ago

    Since updating from v3.7.1, every page and post appears in Google search with a separator followed by my name added to the end of the Page/Post Title.

    Thus a Post Title which appears in the Snippet Preview as simply:

    Site Title – Post Title

    Is displayed in Google search as:

    Site Title – Post Title – myfirstname mysecondname

    This happens whether I use smart tags or manually insert the title. It happens on my live site which uses AIOSEO v 4.0.16 but not with my staging site which is still running v 3.7.1

    I have looked at the source that has been cached by Google for my latest post and my name only appears explicitly in the lines …

    <script type=”application/ld+json” class=”aioseo-schema”>
    {“@context”:”https:\/\/schema.org”,”@graph” …………
    …… </script>

    Some of my pages are reviews for other parties’ products. While those parties are happy for reviews to appear on other websites they have complained that they do not want my name to appear in the title alongside their own products.

    Why is this happening and what can I do about it?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Plugin Author arnaudbroes

    (@arnaudbroes)

    Hey @dub51uk,

    I’d recommend reviewing the default title format you have set under Search Appearance > Post Types. If that doesn’t shed some light on this, then please post a screenshot of your title format here along with an example URL and I’ll be happy to take a look.

    – Arnaud

    Thread Starter dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)

    Thanks. My site is currently down at ISP end. Will reply when they fix it.

    Thread Starter dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)

    Hi. I could not see how to attach screenshots here and my attempt to make them available with links to my site resulted in my being locked out for 24 hrs by my ISP as you can see above.

    I have now produced the screenshots as a page that can be seen here …

    https://blog.warwickconway.com/wp/search-appearance/

    The URL for the post itself is …

    https://blog.warwickconway.com/wp/ian-st-john/

    Let me know if I can provide more info or if there is another way of doing this.

    Many thanks.

    Plugin Author arnaudbroes

    (@arnaudbroes)

    @dub51uk I see you updated to the latest version and your title seems fine to me. Your name isn’t appended to it. Did you make any changes since yesterday?

    – Arnaud

    Thread Starter dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)

    No, I made no changes other than the update to WP 5.7 (which I did yesterday afternoon in preference to it being applied automatically in the next few days). In fact, I was locked out of my site (even through ftp) for 24 hours until noon yesterday and so was unable to make any changes from when I started this thread until my above reply.

    Looking today, my home page (easily found by searching Google for ‘Warwick Conway’) appears in Google with the Title ‘Warwicks World – Warwick Conway’ so it still has the separator and my name appended. The snippet preview shows that it should be displayed as simply ‘Warwicks World’. That was cached on 10th March (yesterday morning).

    Plugin Author arnaudbroes

    (@arnaudbroes)

    @dub51uk your homepage title currently is “Warwicks World” so now it’s just a matter of Google needing to revisit your website and update its search results. This may take a few days or weeks. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything to speed that up. You can see the title of any page by looking at the tab in your browser.

    – Arnaud

    Thread Starter dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)

    That is my point. The post/page title that appears in the browser tab is not the same as the title displayed in Google search which has my name added and is also what the public see as the portal to my site.

    It is neither the username or display name set for my site and was most likely gleaned from the user profile in the admin panel. It is being added by Google and the question is then from where Google have retrieved the information. From the source code for the page this appears to be from the lines that begin “<script type=”application/ld+json” class=”aioseo-schema”> … ” where it appears as the author name.

    This is code generated by the AIOSEO plugin and is a problem I did not experience in v3.7.1.

    Do I have to become an ‘anonymous’ user to fix this?

    Thread Starter dub51uk

    (@dub51uk)

    I have now found the answer to this issue.

    I would first say that Google search results continued to add my name to the post/page title even after re-scraping the page. I have kept records of dates when Google cached certain pages to be certain of when any changes took effect.

    I have also removed all references to my forename and surname at my site until these did not appear anywhere in the meta for the source of each page. What was left in the meta was my Google verification code. This was added to the meta by AIOSEO as a result of my activation of the Google Search Console in the Webmaster tools settings. Google has evidently gleaned my name from the information I provided as site owner when the site was originally verified … and then added this to the post/page title in the search appearance/results.

    I therefore disabled Google search console in AIOSEO by removing the verification code. The Google verification code then disappeared from the meta tags and as a result my name is no longer displayed after the post/page title in Google search on subsequently scraped/cached pages.

    Even so, I am still able to use the Google search console and I am still logged in. When my site was first verified by Google several years ago, I had opted for Google to use the method of uploading a file to my site rather than to add meta to each page. I assume this file is still in place.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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