Google Changing Page Titles & Descriptions

[TheMadScientist]

Does anyone have a good reason why Google couldn't just leave my home page title and description alone when I put noodp on the page?

I personally can't think of one. I can understand wanting to let their users know what the site has, but there's NO WAY they know the other titles and descriptions on the SERP pages better than I know them for my niche, and there's NO WAY they know what stands out on that page or results better than I do, so why do they need to mess with my home page title and description, especially when the page contains a noodp robots tag?

I don't mind if they want to convert ALL CAPS to First Letter Only or truncate it when it's too long, but I wish they would not change the text when I indicate I don't want it changed by using a meta robots noodp tag.

[caribguy]

Brand name only has a positive effect on your click-thrus?

When the searcher types your brand as the keyword, yes.

[tedster]

Google does whatever they want and you just have to take it.

That's sort of the way the web is set up - but it is a 2-way street. You can do what ever you want and others just have to take it. That includes Google. We all have the choice of how our sites will interact. One imbalance that you can not easily change is that you probably need Google more than Google needs you.

There's no rule that says anything about how search results must look - only traditional expectations based on past years.

[TheMadScientist]

Alright, I changed the title (and didn't even cloak it) ... I'll see how this plays out in the SERPs over the next few days ... Right now I'm more curious as to whether it changes back to mine more than anything else.

BTW I can say:
Adding headings (2 thru 6) = Had no effect
Adding other semantic markup = Had no effect

[TheMadScientist]

Title:

Example.Com

Description:

Icon Name Last modified Size Description Apache/N.N.NN (Unix) mod_ssl/N.N.NN OpenSSL/N.N.NN-WWWW-WWWNN mod_auth_passthrough/N.N

On Page Text:

Index of /

Icon Name Last modified Size Description

Apache/N.N.NN (Unix) mod_ssl/N.N.NN OpenSSL/N.N.NN-WWWW-WWWNN mod_auth_passthrough/N.N mod_bwlimited/N.N FrontPage/N.N.N.NNNN Server at www.example.com Port 80

Why would Google show the above as the number 1 result for the 2 word phrase I just searched for and NOT change the title or description?

Great semantic markup? Nope.
Descriptive title? Nope.
Text from the description in the title? Nope.
Great description? Nope.

Why? There has to be a reason...

Really, why would the title of the page I keep talking about get changed and not this one?

The only thing that makes much sense to me is because they actually know what the page I'm talking about is about, so they think they know what it needs to be changed to ... Why else? Someone? Anyone? Why else would they change the one with topical text on the page and topical inbound links, but not the one with poor text in the title, in the description and on the page?

Example.Com is actually EXACTLY the same length as the title shown in the results ... 11 Characters

[sem4u]

I have a problem with Google changing the title tag of a page in the SERPs for certain queries. The problem is that the title in the SERPs is displaying an offer, but the actual offer in the title and the page is half of what is displayed on Google.

It is possibly using title content that was on this page before (if the page has been reused). I have checked internal and external links and the title is not coming from any anchor text. I have updated the title / H1 tag slightly and built a new external link to this page to see if it can be crawled again soon to try and get the right title tag added to the search results.

The problem is that the page is in support for an upcoming TV campaign and it looks bad if the offer is wrong in the SERPs.

[pageoneresults]

It is possibly using title content that was on this page before.

I would think so. If you are NOT using NoArchive, is that information in the cached version?

[sem4u]

I am not using NoArchive but the cached version is up to date.

[pageoneresults]

It would appear that Google have that in an archived version somewhere. Is it more than 6 months old? The offer? If so, is it possible it is coming from an Archive.org entry?

Is there enough data there to do an exact phrase search and see where it appears and where Google may be getting it from?

[sem4u]

It looks like the old offer was introduced at the end of January last year. I had a look on archive.org and there were previous different offers dating back to 2009, but nothing from 2010.

[pageoneresults]

If it were me, I'd drop NoArchive on the entire site and also block ia_archiver from indexing and displaying old copies of the site.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

That's just me though. I have my suspicions about Google Cache and that pesky Archive.org.

[sem4u]

I think that it would be a good idea to block Archive.org, but I do like to see when a page was cached in the SERPs.

However, these are not always reliable as the page I was having problems with has now been updated with the new title, but the cached date is still showing as 2nd March.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I just noticed this tonight on my site for the first time, in my case Google is appending my domain name to the title in the form of "- domain name". I'm not loving the effect.

[sem4u]

The title tag has been changed on another page. This is highly annoying. I have changed the title and H1 slightly again in the hope that it will be corrected in the SERPs.

[flatfile]

Since the last two weeks I'm noticing that Google is showing my site name in lowercase letters. All my pages go like this "Page Title - Word1Word2"(Word1Word2 being my site name), now Google shows "Page Title word1word2". Both words are in different languages so this doesn't read well at all. Even my Twitter page now shows like this on Google, but when I go to Twitter the page has a normal title. Has anyone noticed anything like this?.