Alternating Between Page Title & DMOZ Listing in SERPS

[janejanejane]

Recently, I've noticed when our index page comes up in the Google Serps, either the actual page title is displayed or what I take to be the Google or DMOZ directory listing. The former provides better SERP position than the latter.

Can anyone explain the cause of this fluctuation between Google results? The directory title only appears with a few certain keyword searches (most searches display actual page titles)...

If anyone has any thoughts or experience with this issue, I'd love to determine a cause (and solution). Thanks in advance!

Jane-O

[leppjc]

No answer just confirming that I'm seeing the same thing. Same keyword but on some days its the DMOZ directory listing (not preferred)and other days its the page title (much better description). Seems to have started in the last few weeks.

[Nicke]

I have same problem, it depends of the search and not time of the day most of the time, I think.

Sometimes I have my domain name (it may be a dmoz record) and sometimes my real title.

Had that problem for maybe 2 weeks now.

[drhfinegifts]

Same here, but seeing different versions depending on day & search.

Sometimes I get DMOZ title & DMOZ descrip.

Sometimes DMOZ title & meta tag descrip.

Sometimes meta tag title & DMOZ descrip.

Sometimes meta tag title & meta descrip.

It's weird & it's random. Been happening probably about 2 weeks now.

Odd, very odd.

[green parrot]

I've been seeing the same thing for the past 3 weeks.

Every now and then my site will appear in the SERPs with the title taken from DMOZ.

Can anyone shed any light?

[M_Bison]

I've been seeing our site showing with the DMOZ description in the "new results" (see DC thread).

[Petra Kaiser]

I ever heard if google displays a DMOZ description means less trust in your sites title or description.
If the DMOZ title and or description makes any sense you could ad it to your site. At least this helped us to avoid displaying the DMOZ title in serps.
You could also try a request to change de DMOZ title or description, but you need a very good motivation.

[freshpromo]

I've noticed that even on the same datacenters, Google is displaying different site descriptions in the SERPs depending on what the search phrase is. In one search I did, the DMOZ description was displayed for a certain site, and in a search for a different keyword, the result showed a snippet of visible page text as the description.

This looks to me like Google is presenting listing info that is more relevant to a user's query rather than sticking with a set result. This method can go a long way in improving users' experiences as irrelevant descriptions or page titles can be detrimental even if the result is relevant to the user's query. How many sites do you see out there that just repeat a generic meta description on every page?

That being said, what Google displays in the SERPs and what the algorithm takes into consideration for rankings are two different things. I don't expect these impending changes to affect white hat SEO techniques much.