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First time user here looking for some answers.

When I search for my site in Google my site shows up with the wrong tagline. In google it shows up "just another wordpress site" It should say "a creative web developer for hire in British Columbia Canada"

What I researched and what I am thinking

Most of the research I have done so far suggests that it could take time to update on Googles end. I don't dismiss that as being the answer but is it possible to locate the tagline somewhere in the php files to insure Google is seeing the correct tagline?

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This question is better posed at Stack Overflow. However I would recommend you looking into Yoast SEO to manage this type of thing correctly in a WP install. – Brian Fegter Sep 25 '12 at 19:51

closed as off topic by Michael, Brian Fegter, kaiser, Rarst♦ Sep 28 '12 at 19:03

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1 Answer

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Google doesn't look at the PHP files on your server, they look at the generated HTML for your site.

So (using my site as an example)

  1. Go to the home page of your site (i.e. http://eamann.com)
  2. Right-click and select "View Source"
  3. Look in the <head> element for a tag called <title>.

Example from my site:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="http://eamann.com/wp-content/themes/eleven40/images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://eamann.com/wp-content/themes/eleven40/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.2.8.4 - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ -->
<title>Eric A Mann - The Things that Matter Most</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://eamann.com/" />
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/111597115655849308724/"/>
<!-- / Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. -->

You can see my title tag includes both my site title and tagline: <title>Eric A Mann - The Things that Matter Most</title>. Google will see and index this section.

My recommendation is to check your site's HTML output to be sure your theme is generating the right markup. If so, then you'll just have to wait until Google re-indexes your site.

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It looks good. So this could just be a case of waiting for Google to re-index. – Nick Sep 25 '12 at 18:58

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