Google changing some titles into just "U", "L", or "D"

[nicemkay]

I've noticed some of this behavior recently with some posts.

Previously it happened about a month ago with some new posts, but today it happened with my most popular post which has existed for 6+ months.

I suspect a cause for this was me using the "/" character in the title, instead of something like "or" to keep it shorter. Still it seems absurd for Google to handle so many search related issues and to just get messed up because of a character in the title.

The previous posts that had this issue have been fixed in about 2 weeks I think, however this is one of my most popular posts and because the title changed to just something like "D" I'm losing a huge % of traffic even though I'm ranking in the first results.

I changed the "/" to "or" even though my title becomes too long, cleared cache & submitted for reindexing, but this is extremely frustrating.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing? Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

We can’t do anything to change or influence Googles behavior in rewriting meta titles, unfortunately. You could try to provide feedback and possibly have private correspondence to share your site with them.

Also, if you’re using something like Yoast or Rank Math are you sure you’re not accidentally overwriting the title in these few cases?

 

[nicemkay]

Also, if you’re using something like Yoast or Rank Math are you sure you’re not accidentally overwriting the title in these few cases?

Thanks for replying. The only title edit I make is to remove the %sep% %sitename% in most cases. I don't change the title from the H1 because in previous cases it felt like I'm giving Google free reign to change my titles (this is just a suspicion, and I'm not 100% certain).

I think I've found the issue and I believe it's a glitch from Google.

Given my previous experience with other posts, I'm 99% sure that a combination of characters involving a slash (/) are causing the problem.

For example ABC/XYZ causes this glitch, but ABC / XYZ (separated by spaces) doesn't cause it.

It's frustrating because it's a glitch on Google's end, and it's an extremely noticeable drop in traffic even though my articles are maintaining their rankings for now, and the title update takes effect in ~a few days or more.