Title display in Google is limited to a fixed width, yours is too long.

Please check to make sure the <title> tag is set up the right way.

To do that, you should follow the steps in this Knowledge Base article:
https://kb.yoast.com/article/76-the-seo-title-output-for-the-plugin-doesnt-work-as-expected

Just tried that on WP Twenty Twelve theme. Didn’t make any difference to the error message.

Bunzer, did you get this error, while on the Twenty Twelve theme, with ONLY our plugin activated?

If so, I’d like to hear more about your website setup.

~ Kim ~
Support at Yoast

I’ve been using Yoast SEO and Twenty Twelve (child) for a long time, and I didn’t always have this error message. It seems to have started a few months ago, but I couldn’t say when exactly. Sorry.
I can try turning off other plugins tomorrow and report back here. But I’m off to bed now.

Thanks for the info Bunzer. I’m sure that everyone here that is struggling with this problem would appreciate if you could do that for us and let us know.

If we can reproduce this with just our plugin and one of the default themes, we’ll assist you in getting a bug ticket opened and if we can finally get to the bottom of this pesky thing.

~ Kim ~
Support at Yoast

I disabled all plugins, except Yoast SEO, and I switched to plain Twenty Twelve without any child theme, and I still had the error message on all posts including a blank new one. It doesn’t seem to affect Pages. So, my guess is it’s something to do with bog-standard WordPress Settings.
Unfortunately, switching everything off messed up my site layout, and I’ve spent the last 20 minutes trying to fix it, otherwise I would have reported back sooner ??

Thank you for doing that Bunzer.

I’m sorry to hear that your theme didn’t properly save its settings – I know how frustrating that can be!

I have started a bug ticket here for this issue: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/3009

This bug ticket is only for those who have made sure that they are testing a theme with the title tag correctly set up and that can replicate it with a default theme and only our plugin.

Anyone else reading this thread – if that applies to you – and you have additional information about this bug – please post it in the GitHub thread.

~ Kim ~
Support at Yoast

After a bit of mucking about with Yoast SEO settings, I discovered that the title template was the cause of the error.

My post titles include the post category separated by bars (|). If I remove this, the error message goes away. My categories are not long, and the total length of the titles is not long, so maybe there’s an error in the calculation?

What is too long? How many characters exactly?

(BTW, ‘bog-standard’ is an English phrase, which means very common, or default)

Hello?

@bunzer: Thank you for providing more information on the bug report. I was able to reproduce the issue in a test environment.

Everyone:
Can you please tell me what you have for the title template for the items with this issue. For example, @bunzer had a template with the category variable like this:
%%title%% %%sep%% %%category%%.

Removing the category variable removed the warning.

Using %%category%% breaks preview in backend, reported many months ago, maybe it’s somehow related to this?

I too am seeing this issue, and for me it’s the %%ct_<custom-tax-name>%% variable in the Title template that is breaking it (though it most certainly did work at some point in time). My title template is: %%title%%: %%ct_course%% which should read something like “Chapter 08: French for Reading Knowledge”

Instead I get the warning and a blank SEO title, as the OP reported.

Manually typing out the SEO title does not generate the warning, so the problem doesn’t appear to be the length of the title but rather with the taxonomy variable.

Thank you for your patience. The next release (ETA: Nov 2) is expected to resolve this issue.