Drop in traffic last 24 hours plus title tag not correct

[neildt]

Over the last 24 hours we've seen a drop in traffic to our website from Google. Basically since Satursday 19th Nov the traffic has drop about 50% normal levels.

The strange thing I noticed is that when you search Google for a search phrase the snippet Google is showing as the title is not the same as we have in a meta title tag on the page and this is across many pages, not just 1 or two.

Anyone know why this is and what is happening ?

Thanks

[tedster]

First, just so no one gets confused, I'm going to get a little picky about words. Traditionally, Google uses the title element - not the meta title. In fact, most pages on the web do not even use a meta title element. A second nit-pick - the word "snippet" describes the section BELOW the page title in the search results. That "snippet" often comes from the meta description - although depending on the search phrase Google may plug in words they pick up from elsewhere.

Google started altering the existing title elements many months ago - it may even be more than a year. It's done on a query by query basis - so the same page may not see a changed title for some searches even though it does get changed for others.

They've been working on their algorithm for when to change the page's title and how, with a goal of improving click through. However, sometimes the algo has been making some very odd choices that seem to hurt click through. It is an automated algorithm, so I'm been patiently waiting for it to settle down and get smarter.

There's a funny coincidence here. Just a bit after your post, we got a report that Google STOPPED changing another member's titles reference [webmasterworld.com]. It looks like they've been updating the "title change" algorithm again in recent days.

[neildt]

Am thinking it might be to do with a recent Google tweet [twitter.com...] Minor Panda algorithm data refresh (affects <1% of searches).

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:35 pm (utc) on Nov 21, 2011]
[edit reason] fixed twitter link by removing /#! [/edit]