Duplicate TITLE tag tech tip for Yoast Wordpress SEOs

From the obscure technical advice department... I've been helping out a client with a problem of search-engine visibility, and the solution was so unexpected that I figured it might be a good idea to blog about it just in case someone else out there striking this problem is able to find this post. So what was the problem?

The client was using a pretty common pair of tools - the Wordpress content management system and the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. However the site title tag was being displayed incorrectly; specifically,

bloginfo('name')

was being appended to the page TITLE attribute twice. So each page's TITLE tag was coming out in this form:

Carefully-crafted web page title - WebsiteNameWebsiteName

I checked header.php and the title was configured as minimally as possible: just

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

So where was the duplicate bloginfo('name') coming from? After a lot of trial and error I discovered that it was creeping into the title tag via a function in functions.php!

If you've encountered this problem - and I can see that lots of people out there are just as stumped as I was - edit your Wordpress theme's functions.php and look for

function twentyten_filter_wp_title

Comment that entire function out and your Yoast-tweaked Wordpress title tags will return to normal.

99% of the people reading this probably won't care, but if you're in the 1% this might save you some time and hassle :)

-- Simon