Weird page headline in Google organic result

[pankajj]

Hi,

The story goes like this, I was searching for a page of our website, whether it is indexed or not in google. Finally found it but with wired headline showing in the result page of google.
I tried searching for those terms in the page code and they were not present in the order it was showing up in Google.

Any idea what all has changed in the logic for google to decide what and how to show in organic ranked pages headline.

Hope, am able to explain.

[goodroi]

Google has a long history of sometimes displaying a headline that is not from your title tag. Historically it was often the DMOZ title. Recently Google seems to be creating headlines from anchor text more often than they previously did.

Google also conducts hundreds of experiments every year and these experiments can test new methods of creating a headline. Their goal is to come up with headlines for a good user experience so satisfied users keep returning to Google and using it. I would expect Google to continue evolving and becoming more complicated. In other words I expect Google to display title tags less often as the headline as they keep searching for ways to create the "perfect headlines" for their serps.

[Sally Stitts]

Too much meddling.
Yesterday, the index.html page of one of my sites displayed the TITLE of ANOTHER site. C'mon Google. You don't think I know the name of my own d@mned site?
Too much meddling.
.

[Robert Charlton]

Regarding Google changing titles on purpose, see this discussion, one of many we've had on the topic....

Google is testing altered page titles
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4206724.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[pankajj]

Hi,

Just found a few threads around what must be the experiment.
I read that as part of the experiment, where Google is showing headline different from the page title, they are adding the domain name.
In the wired headline I saw, there were 3 words, the last was the domain name and the first 2 were text used most often across our website to link to this page. So, if this holds some juice, in this experiment Google used the Link text and domain name.

[walkman]

It's early in the morning so I have to just say that I have seen and don't like it a bit.

It's even worse, since sites are being penalized by Google if users didn't find what they were looking for and bounce or return to Google fast.