SEO Title Question

For some reason for many of my clients and my own website, when I make titles in the past 6 months on Google with | it comes out as :

So for example if the title is structured on my back end like so:

Keyword Keyword Keyword | Company Name

The SERP results will show it as:

Company Name: Keyword, Keyword, keyword

I check other competitors and their SERP results show

Keyword Keyword Keyword | Company name

For some reason only for myself and my clients it keeps showing with a colon, even when I check incognito

Is anyone else having this issue or knows how to fix it?

Thanks

Never seen such a thing, you got weird browser plugins screwing with things?

You can change thing around using a plugin like Yoast and All in One SEO..

I'd suggest All in One over Yoast as they keep having issues.

I think you messed up the order on Yoast. Check the order of the components on the title at Yoast's snippet when you edit/create a post

FINALLY
I've been having the same problem for the past 3 months!!

I use Wordpress with Yoast SEO.

I also thought it must be some wrong setup or something but when I throw my page into random online meta-tag scanners or even the freaking GSC they always show it correctly. Also in the heading, in the text that shows next to the favicon when I load the page - I can see the keywords the way I want.


No fix though yet

This is normal. Just like how Google will dynamically populate the meta description if they find more relevant information on the page (based on the user query), they can also change the page title to create a more relevant or poignant title.

Matt Cutts explains here:


"We're looking for a concise description of the page that is relevant to the query"

EddieN said:

I think you messed up the order on Yoast. Check the order of the components on the title at Yoast's snippet when you edit/create a post

Click to expand...

Its happening whether I use Yoast or WIX. I have some clients on WIX and its the same problem.. I just don't get how come I don't see any other competitors who are doing | having this issue, only myself and my clients are appearing with the colon in titles.

I did think it was Google preferring to show the sites this way as per above, but it is strange..my titles aren't drastically different than my competitors at all.. neither is my on-page content, so it just seems really random.

Check yoast seo setting... Or try this format

Keyword Keyword Keyword | Company name

Zack Devin said:

Check yoast seo setting... Or try this format

Keyword Keyword Keyword | Company name

Click to expand...

I'm having the same problems with 2 totally different pages and I tried exactly that. No luck
Just connected to the GSC yesterday with correct metas already and today it is in google with the wrong description...very strange