Site / store meta title appearing incorrectly

[kealanm01]

Hello all,

 

 

 

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, however I cannot find anything in any of the existing posts. 

 

We recently purchased the branding removal key and applied it correctly to the site, which worked fine, however there is still a leading ( - ) in the page title. Our pages therefore all appear as,      - Go Outdoor Ireland with a leading minus before every page title.

 

I am at a loss, any advice here would be great

 

 

 

 

Script Version 5.2.12 PHP Version 5.4.34 MySQL Version 50535

 

[bsmither]

Welcome kealanm01! Glad to see you made it to the forums.

 

This may be caused by having several of your product/document/category pages not getting a Meta Title assigned when your site is configured for Search Engine Friendly URLs, and having the Store Settings, Search Engines tab, "Global Meta Data Behaviour" set to Merge.

 

Can you confirm these settings?

[kealanm01]

Hello bsmither,

 

 

Thanks for your quick reply and warm welcome. 

 

I can confirm that the settings are set to merge, you are also correct in the point you have made with regards to the large numbers of pages with no meta title at all. 

 

Currently doing work on a site that has only recently after many years of use, warmed to the idea of SEO, so I have an uphill battle ahead. What can I do to progress the matter I fear alterations to the stores base meta title is going to set me back again in rankings so I am keen to get this out of the way if possible.

 

Thanks again

 

Kealan 

 

P.S. not sure if this is relevant at this point, but I have added titles to a large number of pages and the issue is universal across the board.

[bsmither]

Please try a quick test. Set the "Global Meta Data Behaviour" to 'Replace'. If you are not happy with the results, switch it back.

 

In the meantime, I will find where in the code we can make an edit to remove the leading dash when it occurs.

 

Please tell me the exact version of CubeCart you are running. Admin, Dashboard, Store Overview tab.

[kealanm01]

Hi bsmither,

 

 

Cheers again I tried the above changes, and while yes as advised it got rid of the issue but it also removed the meta title from the homepage entirely so I have reverted in the interim to avoid general search engine unhappiness. I could work around renaming the meta titles for the pages which I would be happy to do, however I do not know how to tackle the missing title on home. Thanks again for any assistance.

 

Kealan 

 

Required info

 

Technical Details Script Version 5.2.12 PHP Version 5.4.34 MySQL Version 50535 Image folder size 182.99 MB Download folder size 0.03 KB Max. Upload filesize 32M Browser user-agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36 Server Software Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.10-dev

[bsmither]

In admin, Documents, do you have a document in the list where the Homepage indicator is selected?

 

If not, that could be the cause.

 

If there is a "Homepage" document, does it have a title?

 

If not, that could be the cause.

[kealanm01]

I am not sure if facepalm! quite covers the sentiment, but doh! just might. 

 

It appears my homepage had no title, because my homepage had no title.

 

Cheers bsmither