SEO Pro Extra (Sterc) question - title vs. long title

77 Posts

hgw7m Reply #1, 11 years, 8 months ago

Hello,

I'm using SEO Pro Extra from Sterc (which is great as is SEO Tab).

The [[+seoPro.title]] placeholder is reflecting the 'Title' entry as I expected.

The Google preview of SEO Pro (first line) however is showing the longtitle (plus site name, of course).

I was expecting that the Google preview should show the pagetitle in the first line. In my use of MODX, 'Title' generally goes into title meta tag with tv pagetitle, and 'Long Title' goes into h1 tag.

With 'Long Title' in the first line it seems to me that the preview doesn't reflect the Google result as it will appear ...

I was looking in system settings, there are some SEO Pro settings but not related to this issue. It seems I'm missing something ... ?

I'm using Revo 2.3.2 and SEO Pro version 1.0.3-pl

Thanks for your help!

This question has been answered by hgw7m. See the first response.

[ed. note: hgw7m last edited this post 11 years, 8 months ago.]

953 Posts

iusemodx Reply #2, 11 years, 8 months ago

I worked as an SEO a long time back, but keep up with things for my sites obviously.

The title tag isn't always used in the SERPs by Google - others will argue that it is always used.

My experience since 2000 has been - Google uses what it wants to use.

If G thinks your website is relevant for a search term, the title shown in its SERPs maybe totally different to what is in your renderred <title></title> tag.

Or am I on the wrong lines of thought here ?

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77 Posts

hgw7m Reply #3, 11 years, 8 months ago

Quote from: iusemodx at Feb 18, 2015, 06:28 PM

I worked as an SEO a long time back, but keep up with things for my sites obviously.

The title tag isn't always used in the SERPs by Google - others will argue that it is always used.

My experience since 2000 has been - Google uses what it wants to use.

If G thinks your website is relevant for a search term, the title shown in its SERPs maybe totally different to what is in your renderred <title></title> tag.

Or am I on the wrong lines of thought here ?

Hello,

thanks for your reply. My experience from long ago up to now: if your title tag is not too long and Google doesn't think you want to trick him/her/it (?), Google will show your title tag. Same for meta description. Length is here up to 150/160 characters now. It should reflect your page content and be individual for each page.

If there are some html errors on the site, especially in the head, sometimes Google decides to get meta descriptions for your site (title I never observed) from directories or from you body content.

Google appreciates good titles and meta descriptions, there's no need to mess around for Google if there is no real reason to it.

discuss.answer

77 Posts

hgw7m Reply #4, 10 years, 8 months ago

Hello,
I'm answering the question myself. In order to get the Google Preview Box of SeoPro to show the pagetitle instead of longtitle I tweaked the seopro.js in assets/components/seopro/js/mgr at line no.169 from longtitle to pagetitle:

if (MODx.isEmpty(seoPro.config.values['longtitle'])) {
          title = seoPro.config.values['pagetitle'];
        } else {
          [b]title = seoPro.config.values['pagetitle'];[/b]
        }

        if(siteNameShow){
	        siteName =  ' ' + delimiter + ' ' + MODx.config.site_name;
        }else{
	        siteName = ' ';
        }
        Ext.get('seopro-google-title').dom.innerHTML = title + siteName;

The if/else clearly does not make any sense anymore, but it works. I simply don't want the longtitle to be part of my title tags.

Answered SEO Pro Extra (Sterc) question - title vs. long title