Sorry – I am not ignoring you on this but I need help with it. I have read it three times now and I am not even sure I really understand the question I have still not got my head round or learnt to play the SEO game so if you can be patient I need to get help!

Yellow Swordfish said
Sorry – I am not ignoring you on this but I need help with it. I have read it three times now and I am not even sure I really understand the question I have still not got my head round or learnt to play the SEO game so if you can be patient I need to get help!

G’mornin, Andy.. or is it Steve.. Think i have it right (finally.) Never was good at remembering names.

Anyway.. It all boils down to using SP as the home site page. And what is displayed in the browser and Title line.

Previously i used SP as it’s default WordPress page that it creates on installation. WordPress will allow any page to become the default Home or Landing page in settings > reading. So i am using the forum page as the home / landing page.

It’s easy enough to see what search will pick up by viewing any pages source. SP uses a Pipe “|” as it’s separator between the sites name and any categories topics posts. This is what I’m having problems with.

AIO SEO has an option to disable on a post / page. Previously when using SP as it’s default page, i left AIO active on the page but left it’s fields empty. But when using the SP page as the home / landing page, AIO puts the home page specific page meta title, description, and keywords, on every SP page. I can clearly see what this is telling the crawlers by viewing the page source.

I need AIO for the blog posts, it’s the only thing that puts the meta description and keywords tags into the blog posts.

Toggling disable AIO in the SP forum page removes AIO home page description keywords from the forum pages, and allows the description meta tag to be read from SP in the SEO settings page. That’s all cool.

Now here is the problem. SP is displaying it’s forum page name as HOME. I can get rid of that by toggling off the show forum page in the SEO settings. But no matter what i do, I can’t get rid of that Pipe “|” after the home name display. Or as this site shows “| NaruMessenger.com”.

Since SP is now the Home page, i really don’t need that pipe in there when in home page view. I tried everything, including removing the title from the SP page completely. No dice. For now i renamed the page to Main and that’s what Google is showing this morning. And it also appears Google is picking up the proper title and description from the SP categories and topics, etc. So i got that part right.

As an SEO tip, you can view any pages source with FireFox and search that source for “Description” and “Keywords” that is what the crawlers look for. The “Title” is always up top, and it’s very rare not to see one in a sites source code. But it’s that Title that search crawlers look for. If it’s nor correct it will effect a sites page rank and placement in search.

I know I’m bad expressing what I’m thinking.. Hopefully this makes it a little clearer.

Thanks

So the problem is – let’s see if I have got this right – SP is NOT removing the pipe separator when there is no content to the left. Does that more or less encapsulate it?

Yellow Swordfish said
So the problem is – let’s see if I have got this right – SP is NOT removing the pipe separator when there is no content to the left. Does that more or less encapsulate it?

Yep.. But if it is removed, hopefully the forum page name is removed as well.

hopefully???

It’s working OK with just Main showing on the site listing. Guess the forums have to be called something even if the forum page is used as the home page.

But thanks for the help..

np. glad to help as always…