Two different titles in SERPS

[whatson]

For some reason one of my pages has a different title from the header in the SERPS, I am not sure how this is happening or where this is coming from.
However, if I do a search for all the keywords in the title, it produces the result with the title from the header.
Any ideas?

[tedster]

Google has been doing this for a while now - what can I tell you. If their new "title algo" thinks a title change would be better for getting clicks after a particular search term, they will change the original title for that particular search. They pull in the other title words from any number of places.

[whatson]

Oh really? I wasn't aware of this. However, I am not sure this is the case here, as it has lost positions (massively), since the title change.

It's actually an old title from about a month ago, it appears to be using. And the current title is not any part of the page content.

[tedster]

It's actually an old title from about a month ago

Now that is different. You haven't accidentally created some crawling obstacle for googlebot, by any chance?

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In terms of the title change thing, that started small scale back in 2010 and now is pretty widespread. See Google is testing altered page titles [webmasterworld.com]

[whatson]

It had recently been disallowed by robots.txt file, and since it has been back in, it showing that title.