Dash In SERP Result

Which post? I googled your site and home page title is showing as “Exploring Upstate | A Blog About Discovering Upstate NY” in SERP, no dash.

Yeah, the domain title seems to be fine. It appears to be in SERPs for posts. Try doing a search for “Tinker Nature Park Fairy Houses”.

Ahh I see…

What’s even more strange is that a google search for “Exploring Upstate Tinker Nature Park Fairy Houses” doesn’t have the | but just –

but a google search for just “Tinker Nature Park Fairy Houses” does have the | which is even weirder because the hyphen is the unwanted character not the bar character…

It actually looks like something is not working or isn’t set.

The source of the blog page in question only has this rendered as title:
<title>The Fairy Houses of Tinker Nature Park [CLOSED] |</title>
So the site name isn’t actually even there, Google is adding it to the title in SERPs.

I checked another blog post and it’s the same case:
<title>Birdsong Fairy Trail in Mendon Ponds Park Near Rochester |</title>

So… I’d assume something is not set…

Is your site’s name actually set in WordPress’s General Settings?
Are you sure you have the SEO Title for Posts set properly as %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% in the Search Appearance settings?

If both of those things check out, I’d check the Yoast SEO meta box on individual blog posts to see if those are set incorrectly and overriding the global settings set in Search Appearance.

Hope this helps,

-john snow

I’m afraid I’m a bit lost now.

The WordPress General Settings definitely has the site name set. No characters, just the words “Exploring Upstate”.

the SEO Title for Posts is

Title Page Separator

is that wrong?

the SEO Title for Posts is

Title Page Separator

is that wrong?

Yes that is wrong. %%page%% is more for categories and archives that have multiple pages of posts since it outputs “page 2 of 6” and “page 3 of 6” etc..

try this as SEO title for Posts: %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

That should get you what you are wanting!

If you want to go a step farther you can use %%title%% %%sep%% %%primary_category%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% to have the post’s category also put in the title, not so useful if all of your posts are in the “blog category though.

To get a better understanding of what all the variables do and how to use them I suggest checking out this page https://kb.yoast.com/kb/yoast-wordpress-seo-titles-metas-template-variables/.
Once you have a better understanding of the snippet variables you can click the “NEED HELP?” button at the top of the Search Appearance page of your website, right below the “General” and “Content Types” tabs, and then click “Snippet Variables” on the right to open a nice little cheat sheet of all the variables any time you are needing a quick reminder.

Thanks, man. I think I’ve set up my Posts and Pages correctly now. Appreciate your help with this!