Problems:
1. Search results showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Trackback also Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.
Keep these problems in mind, while reading this article, as you may get confused in the middle, as you might not have come across such a problem.
TrackBack:
TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.
Pingback:
For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.
Quick Solution: If you have similar problem as told above, just goto All-in-one SEO plugin settings page and uncheck “Rewrite Titles:” option and save the changes. Now test your blog using spider-test(for more info regarding the use of this tool, read the full article) tool. The changes made will not be reflected immediately in search results page. So resubmit your site map using Webmasters tool and wait for some time.
Effects of the problem: Creates more problem!
1. Google Search Ranking decreased significantly.
2. Webmasters tool started showing hundreds of duplicate titles in the “title tag issue” section.
3. Organic traffic almost declined, as the users didn’t find the title to be meeting their search criteria.
4. The pings sent by our blog seemed to be spammy. As it showed our blog title instead. It seemed to be like, I am trying to promote my blog or just linking to grab the attention.
Detecting the problem:-
First conclusion: Problem was with our blog
If we had problem with only search engine indexing, we might have thought about changing the XML file(that we had submitted to search engines). And to look into Webmasters tool etc. But the second problem confirmed us that, the problem was 100% with our blog and not with search engine indexing.
Second conclusion: Problem was with our theme
Preliminarily everyone thinks that the problem will be caused by the plugins. We removed all the less useful plugins and retained only the must and best once. But the problem still persisted!
We changed the theme, linked to one of our article(inter linking) and published it. Now when we saw the Trackback, it was showing the heading/title of the article. That means the problem was with the theme.
Started hunting for the code responsible for the problem, inside the theme:
We started building the theme again from the scratch. Built-it. Installed it. With full relaxation, published an article, with an linkback to one of our article. To our surprise the same problem started appearing again. i.e., the title of the trackback was showing the blog title(“Technotip.org”), instead of showing the article title/heading!
Tool that came to our rescue:
The tool is spider-test, which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy. In simple words, it shows how the search engines see a webpage.
When I saw one of the article of our blog using the tool, it showed “Technotip.org” as in the title tag, while the original source code was still showing the article title in the title tag.
The final Solution found:
Now I started changing things one by one and saw the title tag using the above tool. At one point of the test, the title tag showed the tite of the article. That is when we unchecked the “Rewrite Titles:” option is All-in-One SEO plugin. After the problem was solved we resubmitted the sitemap in webmasters tool. And every article of our blog got re-indexed and now the ranking for different keywords are restored.
We had previously asked other bloggers who are using WordPress and All-in-One SEO plugin, for All-in-One SEO plugin settings. They have checked the “Rewrite Titles:” option and everything is working fine for them. And we are using minimum number of plugins and non related to title tag, so I don’t think any other plugin was conflicting with All-in-One SEO plugin.
Many people with similar problem:
While searching solution for this problem, I came across many forum posts and saw that many people have and still have the same problem with their blog. So I decided to write about it. Hope this article and the tool mentioned above will surly help them detect and solve the problem.
All-in-one SEO plugin is a wonderful tool and we highly recommend this tool to every blogger using WordPress. The new version also comes with the canonical link option, just with a click. Canonical link option with SEO plugin makes sense, as it helps improve the SEO.
Eventhough I could somehow detect the problem and even its solution, I am not sure about the reason why “Rewrite Titles:” option in All-In-One SEO plugin causing problem to some themes! If anyone knows about this, then please please share it with us.