Same URL, two different page titles for two different searches - how?

[aakk9999]

A competitor's home page shows two different page titles in Google SERPS depending on keywords searched.

For example, two most searched phrases are KW1 KW2 and KW1 KW3 KW2.

If I search KW1 KW2, the SERPS shows title "KW1 KW2 - #*$!x"
If I search KW1 KW3 KW2, the SERPS shows title "KW1 KW3 KW2 - #*$!"

Both searches rank home page for these two different titles.

If I click on the title for either search, the actual title on the page is "KW1 KW2 - #*$!x"

This has been happening in Google SERPS for over a few months so I do not think this is owing to possible data centre difference in them changing the home page title with some data centres picking it up and others not yet.

I am wondering if anyone knows how this is done and what would Google make out of it? Or is it in fact Google that changes their title in SERPS (they rank as #1 for both terms).

Note that Yahoo and Bing both show the KW1 KW2 title in their SERPS for both searches, so this seem to be Google specifics.

[tedster]

This is something Google is doing, and not something your competitor or you can make happen. They started tweaking the clickable title more often recently. The idea is to make it more appropriate for that particular query, I assume.

[adipkn]

I have posted the same query in a seperate thread a few days ago. Google is showing different page titles for my home page for different queries. I guess this is something Google is doing on its own - you can not control it.

[tedster]

However, you can notice what searches are important to you and make sure the page title reflects that vocabulary well. Then you're less likely to see Google invent something new for a clickable title. It still might happen, just less likely.

[adipkn]

@tedster - i have tested using appropriate title and meta data that reflects the query well. I have also checked out the backlink anchors as well. For example, my page title says 'blue widget marketing', the page is about 'blue widget marketing' and the backlinks to the page contain 'blue widget marketing' as anchors. Still the same result.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

So you mean Google is showing different title when searched for "Blue widget Marketing" when this same phrase is present in title of the ranking page?

[adipkn]

@ankitmaheswari - yes, that is what i mean.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

See if the title is picked from Dmoz, in that case use the noodp meta tag to block that title from appearing

[adipkn]

@ankitmaheswari - no, the site is not listed in DMOZ.

[c41lum]

Seen something very similar

I have recently changed my Titles on a few of my pages because of a duplication issue we found with our titles.

Google is now showing both the OLD title and the NEW title depending on what you search for.

So when I search: 'Blue widgets online" it shows the OLD title.

But when I search 'Blue widget reviews online' it shows the new title.

Also does any one know the best way to remove lower case Canonical duplications, we have recently spotted that Google has indexed both our upper case and lower case URLs we've fixed the problem by 301'ing the incorrect URL to the correct one but its been 2 months now and Google are still showing both URL's when I do a unique string search. Should I do a re-inclusion request?

[edited by: c41lum at 4:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2009]

[c41lum]

We have no listing in DMOZ

[Robert Charlton]

What happens to your snippet or description when the title is changed?

Re the title... does the changed title correspond to the anchor text of a strong inbound link? Seems to me I remember once hearing something about such a possible mashup. The snippet team (or whatever team handles titles) might reason that if a revised title better matches a query, and there's an inbound link that better matches the query, then that's some kind of third party confirmation that this anchor text is OK as a title.

PS: If this is what they're doing, I don't like it either. I myself prefer first party confirmations... my own. Google obeys the "noodp" robots tag. It would be nice if there were a "keepmytitle" tag as well.

[c41lum]

The snippet is staying the same. Its just the Tittles that are changing between the Old Tittle and the New tittle.

Basically we need to remove the old tittle because it has been duplicated on several lower lever pages there for getting is some kind of minus 50 penalty.

Anyone know of a way of getting G to remove the old tittle faster.

Thanks

[pbaddock]

i have seen this a few times.

result sets are cached, not necessarily sites. so your site title, snippet etc is cached for a certain search query. for a different query there is a different cache of your title, snippet.

G just hasn't updated the cache of the other search query yet.

[g1smd]

This also used to happen when the first query returns the current version of the page in the SERPs, and the other query returns data from the supplemental results index representing an older version of the content that used to be on that page (but is no longer on that page).