Google adds my main keyword to my titles

[atlrus]

I have seen the threads of Google changing the titles of pages, heck, I have been a victim of this myself, but it usually is about shortening the title to a keyword or not displaying the entire title.

Today I've found a new way Google is messing with your site titles - by adding your website's main keyword to the title of the internal pages!

Let's say your website is getting back-links with the main keyword being "blue widgets". And you have an inner page focusing on "super cool widgets". What I've seen in the past couple of days is Google changing the title of the inner page from "Super Cool Widgets - Get them here" to "Super Cool Widgets - Get them here - blue widgets" when you search for super cool widgets, for example.

What's up with this?!? I didn't see any recent threads about this, nor any posts from Google peons alerting to this change.

The way this is going - I may as well just buy the domain and transfer it to Google and let them build their own website...

[tedster]

Google usually varies their altered titles according to the query phrase. Are you seeing any pattern like that?

[enigma1]

It's also how Google perceives the content of your pages. When they do that it's very easy to make corrections to the content or tags if necessary. But usually they don't.

From what I've seen they modify the summary picking the most appropriate section(s) from the page to match the search criteria. Unless the meta-tags deviate a lot from the content and a proper title cannot be determined.

[linkbuildr]

Is that keyword in the alt="" of the main images on those pages? If so then I've seen that happen a lot lately....go figure =/

[atlrus]

It's really weird, it seems that Google is just adding a keyword to the inner page title arbitrary. Just like the example I gave, it adds a dash and then what appears to be your website's index page main keyword. I have seen this with competitors' websites, as well, so it's not limited just to mine, i.e. it's not really something I've done.

A more striking example with one of my internal pages:

The internal page title is "The coolest gadgets - top 3 coolest gadgets", but sometimes Google would display the title in the search results as "The coolest gadgets - top 3 coolest gadgets - blue widgets", blue widgets being my home page targeted keyword.