Issue with Title and Google

I’ve created a WordPress theme that uses Roots as it’s foundation and I’m experiencing a really odd issue when my sites are displayed on Google.

I’m using Yoast’s WP SEO to handle the meta and I’m force rewriting the titles but for some reason Google is picking up a cookie cutter template of the title. I’ve tried it on different domains using the same theme and they all display something like Blog Title: Beginning Of SEO Title.

For Example this what the listing should look like

New Luxury Apartments in Brandon Florida | The Oasis at Brandon
Coming Fall 2014, The Oasis at Brandon will be the newest luxury apartments in Brandon with amenties you’ll want to brag to your friends about.

This is what the listing looks like on Google SERP’s

The Oasis at Brandon: New Luxury Apartments in Brandon Florida
Coming Fall 2014, The Oasis at Brandon will be the newest luxury apartments in Brandon with amenties you’ll want to brag to your friends about.

I’ve checked the rich snippet testing tool and it reads the website information as it should. I thought it was a problem with Google but every single site I’ve deployed the framework on has it’s SEO title display in the same format as above. Which leads me to believe it’s something they’re picking up from the website. I’ve tried recrawling the websites through Google Webmaster tools and still no change.

What’s interesting is that Bing reads it just fine so I know that WP SEO is working correctly. I’ve searched through all the code and I really have no idea where the semi-colon and ordering of the title could be coming from. Any help is appreciated as we are using Roots on quite a few apartment community sites and really love it!

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this issue? I can post code from my head.php file, cleanup.php, and config.php if needed.

This is also the case for shoretelsky.com:

  • <title>: Hosted VoIP | Business Phone System | Cloud PBX Service | ShoreTel Sky
  • Google: ShoreTel Sky: Hosted VoIP | Business Phone System | Cloud PBX …

I noticed this on shoretelsky.com about a year ago, and it hasn’t changed at all. I don’t think this is related to Roots, WordPress, or WordPress SEO. Doing a quick search I found https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/customsearch/tthq0EMzpps, which mentions a site that’s not running WP and also seeing the same thing.

Also:

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Hey thanks Ben. Not sure why they’re singling out the page titles only to reverse the order of them and remove a "| ". I’ll have to see if I can change that result. Thanks for the help!

I went back and reviewed some of the sites I have setup and it only moved the last part to the beginning on google when it is the root of the domain on each.

Did it do that on every site you checked? It’s doing that exact thing to the root of mine.