SEO or Search Engine Optimization is becoming a critical part of client acquisition these days and with the recent changes in Google’s organic search results, search is now going to be securely encrypted; and web site owners can no longer look at Google Analytics to see exactly which words people use when searching Google to find their sites. See details here.
For many businesses and personal bloggers who use WordPress as a platform for their websites, SEO plugins are very useful. One of such plugins is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
For SEO purposes, it is very important that blog post titles are optimized because titles are very important for search engines. In addition, if a blog or site name contains your keywords, or the name appears in the title of posts, search engines may classify such posts as spam.
Although the problem of blog or site names appearing in post titles could be attributed to the theme or template used by the site, WordPress SEO used to make it possible to customize posts so that only the title appears, and not the post title plus the blog name. See section 2 of this great WordPress SEO guide by the folks at WPBeginners for more details on the difference between a title and a title template.
The problem:
The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin offered the ability to edit the title of posts until a recent update. The new update makes it impossible to update or edit the title. With this update, the field is pre-populated without the option of editing it. When you put the cursor in there to edit it, you cannot select or highlight any of the text in the title box.
And although there are hacks out there on how to edit the theme or template to prevent the blog name from showing up in your posts, we are only concerned about fixing the problem in WordPress SEO, until hopefully, the bug is fixed. Unless it was intentional.
So here’s the quick workaround for WordPress SEO editing problem:
- Click on the title box and press the space bar on your keyboard.
- Edit the SEO title
- Save the draft or update your post.
Blank editable box in WordPress SEO after pressing the space bar:
Edited title in WordPress SEO without the blog name:
This quick fix worked for me, but as they say, your experience may be different. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a great tool and this temporary setback should not discourage people from using it.
One final thing, there is an option in the WordPress SEO settings where you can tell it not to add the site name to your posts:
On the settings page, click on the “Post Types” tab and on the section that says “Posts”, type in “%%title%%” (without the quotes, of course).
This will only now just show the title of the article without the site name.
Happy blogging.
