[Plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast] Yoast deletes the – in my product title.

I just reactivated the plugin. It turns all my pages that are “Item-A” to “ItemA” I cannot find anything on google SERPS anymore ??

I had this problem too, if you go to the wordpress seo settings and then to the ‘Titles & Metas’ page there is a link labeled ‘Force rewrite titles’

Ticking this seemed to sort the problem out for me.

This is a serious issue, the pages themselves show up correctly its the page source that google is using that shows it incorrectly. How can anyone know its wrong if the appearance leads them to believe it is OK. The problem only occurs when the plugin is active. If I force an SEO title then I can fix it, but only if SEO title is filled out. Otherwise “word-word” becomes “wordword” in everyone’s page source.txt.

If this is breaking peoples SEO this needs to be addressed, how many sites have dropped off SERPs because of this. I know my site barley registers anywhere since using Yoast. I like the plug-in and would like to talk about this.

Can the plugin creator comment?

I just did a force rewrite titles, its makes things worse giving all my pages the same title as the website itself. I have to use Generate SEO title to keep my hyphen in the in the <title></title>.

Yeah sorry i was wrong about the ‘force rewrite title’ thing.

I’m still a little confused as to why it is messing up the titles but i think i’ve found out how to fix it.

My problem was in my theme files. In your header.php where you use wp_title() function make sure you have a value set that is not null and not an empty string for the first argument. This is the separator.

This is what i have set

wp_title( ‘&#8211’, true, ‘right’ )

This &#8211 is a hyphen. I found that if i just used ‘-‘ it ended up showing two hyphens. Good luck.

Have you solved this problem? I seem to have the same: in all post titles with “-” in it, the “-” gets deleted, as in Time-Management becomes TimeManagement.

No I have not fixed it, the only work around was to create custom titles and click “create SEO” title on each page that used a hyphen in the title tag.

If you have lots of pages, posts, or products that use hyphens like mine, this is tedious and TIME CONSUMING. In my case a hyphen or space is a must have!

I uninstalled the Yoast plugin and my rankings improved on the sites I had google re-crawl using webmaster tools. I since researched how to use the built in theme SEO options instead and created XML sitemaps with “BWP Google XML sitemaps plugin.” Which builds pretty good sitemaps, although the Yoast sitemap was a tiny bit better in certain areas for sitemap creation and troubleshooting. BWP Google Sitemaps will work perfectly in its place.

I hope this helps.

if you go here: https://yoursite/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#post_types you can set the default titles for all your different types of content.

so if you set this for posts: ‘%%title%% – your site’ all of your sites posts would conform to that. Much better then editing each individual post.

sorry the link should have been: https://yoursite/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#post_types

Also all the template tags you can use can be found here: https://yoursite/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#template_help