Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
-
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic.
This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!!
Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there.
http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/
-
I see. Thanks so much for the effort to explain in detail.
So, is it because of the yoast wordpress seo plugin i used? Are you using that for your site? Do you have such problem? Because I just installed it prior to the crawl. I was using All In One SEO earlier and the crawl didn't come back with such error.
Google and Bing seems to have no problem getting my title though. Should I fix it or just ignore the problem?
Thanks so much again!
-
Jason,
Go in and turn off your twitter, G+1, plug in and then re run the app. My guess is you will then see title tags through any moz tool. If so, you can choose a different widget or move placement. (when you deactivate the plug in make sure you clear the cache before running crawl).
Hope it helps
-
Thanks Alan,
I like a little mystery hunt

-
Well picked up Sha.
impressed with you level of detail.
-
Hi Jason,
There is obviously something going on with this that is affecting what some crawlers are seeing on your pages.
I ran the Screaming Frog Tool and it shows that the majority of your pages have empty Titles even though I can see that there are Titles loading in the browser.
On checking your code I see that you are using the pragma directive meta element , but it actually appears below the Title element in the code.
Example from your code:
<head> <title>Are You Socially Awkward? | Branding Blog | The Bullettitle> **<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />**So I ran the page through the W3C Markup Validation Service and it also indicates that it sees no character encoding declaration:
No Character encoding declared at document levelNo character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML
metaelement or an XML declaration.So, I believe the issue here may be related to the fact that the pragma directive should appear as close as possible to the top of the head element ie before the Title element.
The following is from the W3.org documentation on declaring character encoding. You will see that there is specific reference to the fact that the use of the pragma directive is required in the case of XHTML 1.x documents as yours is:
For XHTML syntax, you should, of course, have " />" after the content attribute, rather than just ">".
The encoding of the document is specified just after charset=. In this case the specified encoding is the Unicode encoding, UTF-8.
The pragma directive should be used for pages written in HTML 4.01. It should also be used for XHTML 1.x documents served as HTML, since the HTML parser will not pick up encoding information from the XML declaration.
In HTML5 you can either use this approach for declaring the encoding, or the newly specified meta charset attribute, but not both in the same page. The encoding declaration should also fit within the first 1024 bytes of the document, so you should generally put it immediately after the opening tag of the head element.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Cool. Thanks for reminding, Keri. I thought the help desk will reply to this thread.
Sure, I'll post more information back on this thread once I get the answer.
-
Thanks for accessing the site. I hope the next crawl, which will be next week, will be good. Will update you guys.
-
That's an interesting one. I'd email that to the help desk at [email protected] to let them know about it. If there's some kind of cause of it that would be helpful for others to know, it'd be great if you could post more information back on this thread.
-
I just did a cral on your site using Bings ToolKit, and i did not find any errors concerneing tittle.
In fact your site has the best score i have ever got from a wordpress site. Usely a wordpress site is a mess, especialy with un-necasary 301's
I found only 2 html errors, 1 un-necessary redirect and multiple h1.
Wait to next crawl it may come good.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Bing webmaster tools incorrectly showing missing title and description tags
Hey all, Was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue. Bing is showing title and description tags missing in the head of my wordpress blog. I can't seem to find any documentation on this. Thanks, Roman
Technical SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are not Indexing in Google
Hello Every one, I have a Wordpress website in which i installed All in SEO plugin and wrote meta titles and descriptions for each and every page and posts and submitted website to index. But after Google crawl the Meta Titles and Descriptions shown by Google are something different that are not found in Content. Even i verified the Cached version of the website and gone through Source code that crawled at that moment. the meta title which i have written is present there. Apart from this, the same URL's are displaying perfect meta titles and descriptions which i wrote in Yahoo and Bing Search Engines. Can anyone explain me how to resolve this issue. Website URL: thenewyou (dot) in Regards,
Technical SEO | | SatishSEOSiren0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven
Technical SEO | | Zitana0 -
Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important?
My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites. His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not. What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0
