Why isn't Google displaying my search engine listing title?

[Casey03]

Hi,
I have noticed, that when adding a Search engine listing title, that is different from the product title, the Search Engine Listing title is not displayed on the search results. 

So for example, 
Product Title: Red Top
Search Engine Listing Title: Red Top | Brand Name | Shop Name 

Then if you search google for this product, it shows the Title from the product section, but the description from the Search engine listing description. This is not limited to product pages either, it does for the collections as well. 

I would like to think this is incorrect? Google should be displaying the Search engine listing title? 

I hope that makes sense? 

[flareAI]

Hello @Casey03,

Greetings from flareAI app - get free sales from Google! I am Gina, and I am here to help.

It's possible that Google is choosing to display the product title instead of the search engine listing title because it believes the product title is more relevant to the user's search query. However, it's also possible that there's an issue with the way your search engine listing title is formatted or optimized for search engines.

To ensure that your search engine listing title is being displayed properly on Google and other search engines, you should make sure that it's optimized for search engines and includes relevant keywords. You should also avoid duplicate content in your search engine listing titles and product titles, as this can confuse search engines and hurt your search rankings.

Additionally, you may want to consider using structured data markup on your Shopify store to help search engines better understand the content on your site and display rich snippets in search results. This can help increase click-through rates and improve your search rankings.

Hope this helps

Gina

[ilanadavis]

Hey @Casey03,

Though Google can choose whatever page title they want even if you enter the Search Engine Listing Title, this looks more like your theme has it coded this way on purpose.

My guess is that somewhere in your theme files there is some code to automatically add the Brand Name and Shop name to your page titles. If it's not your theme, it could be an SEO app you have installed. You may need to dig around your files depending on your theme to look for the <title> tag to see where it's being applied.

[Casey03]

Hi @ilanadavis 

After my post, and before your reply, I did start digging into the theme code. An you was correct, I did find something that was automatically adding the | Shop Name at the end. So this believes me to believe there is something also in the code that is forcing the use of Title of the product and not the SEO Title in serps. 

This is the code I found:

 <!-- Basic page needs ================================================== -->
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="{{ 'favicon.ico' | asset_url }}" type="image/png" />
  {%- if template contains 'index' -%}
  {%- if page_title != blank and page_title != 'Welcome' -%}
  <title>{{ page_title }}</title>
  {%- else -%}
  <title>{{ shop.name }}</title>
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- elsif template == '404' -%}
  <title>Page Not Found | {{ shop.name }}</title>
  {%- else -%}
  <title>{{ page_title }} | {{ shop.name }}</title>
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if page_description -%}
  <meta name="description" content="{{ page_description | escape }}" />
  {%- endif -%}

[ilanadavis]

Yep @Casey03 that's it. Just keep in mind that these are suggestions to Google and even if you alter this code, they can still choose whatever search result title they want to use.