Wrong titles in the SERPs

[realmaverick]

My page has a title of "Free Blue Widgets - Tagline".

When I search for "Blue Widgets", Google shows the title of the page as "Blue Widgets - Free Blue Widgets - Tagline.

I'm baffled as to where it's getting this from? For some reason it's adding an extra Blue Widgets.

It's happening on many, many pages. This has only been happening post Panda.

I've checked Googles cached pages, my source code, my internal links, external links. No clues.

[tedster]

Most likely Google is not pulling that title from anywhere - they are making it up all on their own from bits and pieces. You may have only noticed it since Panda, but others have been affected for a longer period. They actually have an algortihm that rewrites titles and descriptions when they feel they can increase clickthroughs. This re-writing is different for different query terms.

Here is a discussion on the topic from February: Google Changing Page Titles & Descriptions [webmasterworld.com]

[realmaverick]

Hi Tedster, I've experienced this before, when the title of the page, wasn't targeted to the search term.

In this case, it was almost an exact match. Yet Google threw in another duplicate term for good measure.

In my source code, I noticed "Free Blue Widgets - Tagline". Three spaces between blue and widgets. I don't know if perhaps post panda, Google is reading it as Free Blue as one phrase and widgets as another. Thus throwing in Blue Widgets at the front of my title.

I've removed the extra spaces. Does the above theory seem a little far fetched?

[tedster]

The re-writing is done by a machine "intelligence" so bugs are certainly possible, especially in edge cases. Whether it seems far-fetched or not, I can't rule out your idea.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

They actually have an algortihm that rewrites titles and descriptions when they feel they can increase clickthroughs.

It doesn't always pan out that way. I experienced this several months ago, in my case my site name was being appended after the existing titles, but rankings (and traffic) dropped. Several days later the changed titles were back to normal as were the rankings and traffic.

I can see why Google does this. In this age of webmasters wanting proper SEO titles there are dozens (thousands?) of pages with the exact same titles out there and Google will never show 10 articles with identical titles in the top 10 so it makes sense for them to change a few.

If you rely on free Google traffic to pay your bills Google, and the testing they do, isn't for the faint of heart :-)

[realmaverick]

I just checked WMT for the queries and the CTR is down quite significantly, for the period that they've been altering my titles. Gotta love their meddling and experimentations with our lives :)

[tedster]

Google may feel the same about some SEOs, too. As I've often said, web search is a competitive-cooperative system. Anytime either side forgets that, the results are not happy.

Please let us know if the poor CTR results in Google discontinuing that title rewrite for you.

[edited by: tedster at 1:34 pm (utc) on Apr 17, 2011]

[realmaverick]

I will do. Usually titles on the site are updated very quickly. Especially on high traffic, high ranking pages.

[realmaverick]

Ok I believe the breadcrumbs are actually the issue here. Google always uses my breadcrumbs in the results, which is fine. But now adding duplicate text to my titles, based on breadcrumbs? hmm