Google DIY Titles - not seen this before

[chewy]

So does Google invent its own version of your title tag if it doesn't somehow like it?

I just saw this in the SERP for the first time and wonder if anyone has any experience with this - if it even has a name besides DIY.

Clearly, in this case, there is a real <title> tag, it is correct, it isn't duplicated elsewhere, but the big G seems to think it wants to title the page something else than what we want it to be.

What fun!

[aristotle]

A few weeks ago I saw a case in which the site name was added to the page title. Say the site was called "Widgets World" and the page title was "Antique Widgets". Then in the SERPs the page appeared as "Widgets World - Antique Widgets"

[chewy]

In my case, Google has shortened the title from <good search term + from + company name> to just <company name>.

I the title, the non-widgetized words do actually read well, very much like natural english.

The "good search term" here then appears only twice on the page - so it doesn't seem like some kind of penalty or something.

I've seen this in the past when there was a lot of duplicate content, (due to a CMS gone renegade!) but this is not the case here.

[chewy]

I am seeing this again as an auto tweak done by Google to the title on the main index page.

How does Google think it can do this?

This seems like one more case of Google moving the cheese.

Are others seeing this - does it apply to just main index pages?

Forgive the paranoia here - but if they can do this, what else can they do?

[aakk9999]

Are you sure these not titles pulled out of ODP?

[aristotle]

Are you sure these not titles pulled out of ODP?

Not in my case. Over the past couple of months, Google has consistently done it (changed the title) for two different pages on one of my sites. Neither page is the index page. In both cases, Google adds the site name to the page title. Thus, in the Serps, it appears as "Page Title - Site Name" with a single dash between them. ( The "site name" is the title of the index page.)

I have no idea why Google does this for these two particular pages. There are about 40 other pages on the site which are treated normally.

[chewy]

it can't just be the 2 of us...

[jinxed]

I have just seen this too on one of my sites. Not impressed at all.

[ken_b]

So does Google invent its own version of your title tag if it doesn't somehow like it?

Yes, they sometimes do that.

From November 2009
Matt Cutts explains how Google generates snippets and titles in search results. [youtube.com]

[chewy]

Very nice explanation. Thank you.

So it seems the original title does still seem to somehow fit into the scoring algo.

Isn't it interesting and ironic that as a result of this query, we are helping Matt's video (non search-able) explanation to be found better in Google.

Comments on YouTube there are pretty priceless.

(oh yeah, thanks BT and the gang for the revision that allows links! Good work!)

[g1smd]

I have seen titles of pages in SERPs where the displayed title has clearly been taken from the anchor text of an incoming link pointing to the page in question. The link was found on the page of some other site. This mostly occurs for pages that are disallowed by robots.txt directives, but could quite easily apply in other circumstances.