Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with the SERP titles not matching. It can indeed be frustrating to troubleshoot these kinds of problems.
From your description, it sounds like there may be a misconfiguration in your Rank Math settings, particularly regarding the domain settings. If your site is showing a different domain extension in the SERPs than what you have configured in Rank Math, this could lead to discrepancies in the titles displayed.
Here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot this issue:
- Check Your General Settings: Ensure that your website’s URL is correctly set in the Rank Math settings. Go to Rank Math > General Settings > General and verify that the URL matches your actual domain.
- Inspect Title Settings: Review the title settings for your pages and posts in Rank Math. Make sure that the titles you want to display are correctly configured under Rank Math > Titles & Meta.
- Clear Cache: If you are using any caching plugins, clear the cache after making changes to ensure that the latest settings are reflected.
- Check for Redirects: If there are any redirects set up that might be affecting how your pages are being indexed, review those as well. You can refer to our guide on solving redirection issues for more information.
If you continue to experience issues after checking these settings, please reply to this ticket with the URL of your site so we can assist you further. A human agent from our support team will take over and provide more specific guidance based on your situation.
Thank you for raising this concern, and we hope to resolve it for you soon!
This is an automated reply from Rank Math Support Bot. Your ticket has been assigned to a human agent and we will get back to you shortly.
AI recommended looking here but this doesn’t actually exist:
Rank Math > General Settings > General
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
We checked some of your pages and we can confirm Rank Math is adding the correct meta title for your pages. You can also check this by using https://rankmath.com/tools/meta-tag-analyzer/ and https://www.heymeta.com/
However, Google is still adding an extra separator in SERPs. Nowadays, Google does that very commonly. Even when everything is fine, Google may choose to display a different meta title for your search query result. Google may skip the custom metadata you have set and instead display something from the page’s content that better matches the search intent.
You can follow this URL for details on this issue:
https://rankmath.com/kb/different-meta-title-and-description/
Here is an article you can also check for reference:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-changes-more-than-61-percent-of-title-tags/435618/
Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
Okay, great, but why is AHREFS telling me Google is showing .com in the SERP instead of what the domain actually is (.website). Please see attached.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zyj5xae2ort0sakah8zbb/Screenshot-2025-02-13-at-8.58.06-AM.png?rlkey=xnemxis4o3neeenpufpho48wf&dl=0
Hello,
The .com is added to your title by Google:
But if you check your page, you’ll see Rank Math has added the correct meta title and description:
In this case, we suggest you use the URL Inspection tool on your GSC account to recrawl the URLs and see if Google updates the title on SERPs or not.
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
