Google displaying wrong title / Adds "First -" before the title

Google displaying wrong title / Adds "First -" before the title - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, wordpress, search-results to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google displaying wrong title / Adds "First -" before the title.Problem :

I have a website (wordpess) and the most important page of my website is displayed with a wrong title on Google search results.

The title of the page is in this format: "Category name | Website name". It's not a long title, about 45-50 characters. But as Google displays it; it appears "First - Category name | Website name" in the search results.

This is a major problem for me as this is not an English website so the word "First -" looks really bad.

I've checked the cached page of Google and the cached page appears to have the correct title (without the "First -" in the beginning), so I assume this is not an indexing issue.

Does Google just put that "First -" itself? Otherwise where might that be coming from?

Thanks a lot if anyone can help me. I'm even willing to pay to get rid of this. Such a nuisance this is to me and I just can't figure it out.

Solution :

Does Google just put that "First -" itself?

Nope.

Otherwise where might that be coming from?

There are several things you will need to check since this is WordPress. All of them are misconfigurations of one kind or another

1. Check your plugins to see if you have an SEO helper such as All in One SEO, Platinum SEO or Yoast SEO. if you have one, check its settings to be sure you are not programmatically adding the "First" in front of the title.


2. Also check to see if you are using Facebook OpenGraph elements either hardcoded into the page/post templates or set via a plugin. Search engines will sometimes grab the OpenGraph titles and ignore the <title> tags.


3. Check your functions.php to see if there is a function defined that changes the default title behavior. Depending on how the theme was constructed, you may have to go down the rabbit hole a little and follow a chain of includes to get the whole picture.

These suggestions are ordered from (IMHO) most likely to least, so follow them in this order to save time.

If the issue about seo, google-search, wordpress, search-results is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.