Lowercase P in Google search results for developer.wordpress.org

[SergeyBiryukov]

Most of function reference pages are ​indexed by Google with lowercase P for WordPress in the title (see the screenshot). That doesn't match the actual <title> tag of those pages.

First noticed this a couple of months ago, and it has not changed since then.

This is pretty trivial, but maybe it's something we can fix?

[atimmer]

On the live site WordPress is capitalised correctly, so I think this should be fixed as soon as Google re-indexes.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Yeah, but maybe we can trigger the re-indexing somehow?

[DrewAPicture]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

Yeah, but maybe we can trigger the re-indexing somehow?

Depending on how the sitemaps are structured, we could resubmit the sitemap(s).

[iandunn]

@nickhamze pointed out that it's also happening for the plugin repo description. That text isn't being pulled from the page, though; is it also from the site maps?

[joostdevalk]

Replying to iandunn:

@nickhamze pointed out that it's also happening for the plugin repo description. That text isn't being pulled from the page, though; is it also from the site maps?

That's actually a different bug. It's using the description from DMOZ, which we could prevent by adding a noodp meta robots tag to the head. I've opened ticket #1095 to fix this.

[joostdevalk]

So this problem is caused by the fact that Google thinks it can create a better title for the page than we can and thus generates one itself. The reason for that is that the title we're generating is too long, it would look like this in the search results:

I think we could prevent this by generating a title that's shorter, something like

wp_delete_file() Function | WordPress Developer Resources

To be honest, I don't even think we need the (), and that this could still be too long with longer function names, so an even better option would be this:

wp_delete_file function | WordPress Developer

Happy to provide more input if needed. ​This article I wrote a couple of years ago might give more input too.

[coffee2code]

The site looks to have been re-indexed by Google and this no longer appears to be an issue.