Google ignores <title> and list pages twice on 1 SERP

is this new?

[RonPK]

(I don't check my keywords every day so maybe this has been around for ages...)

My site is www.widget.net. Title of the homepage is 'Widget online - subject1 and subject2'. If I do a search for 'widget', that page ranks #1, as usual ;) . Google however only uses 'widget' where it normally shows the full title. Is that a recent feature, or merely a bug?

Also, the #1 rank gets me the indented block with four popular pages. Nothing wrong with that. The thing is that one of these pages (page1.html) is repeated on the same SERP, in the #2 position. So result #2 is another link to www.widget.net/page1.html. I don't mind, should bring me more traffic, but isn't it strange?

[RonPK]

I noticed that my competitors are facing the same issue with the <title>: Google lists them as 'widget' only too. Maybe Google is inspired by DMOZ, which also only uses 'widget' as anchor texts.

I guess I'll give that new no-dmoz tag a try, even though G does not use the DMOZ description in the snippet.

[edit]typo[/edit]

[edited by: RonPK at 10:04 pm (utc) on July 25, 2006]