Why does Google display the wrong website Title Meta Tag in SERPs?

[rudyespinosa]

Sometimes Google does not display the actual title as written in the website title meta tag.
This happens in the Google Organic Search Results as well as results mixed with Google Places Results.

The ranking is not affected but sometimes the title for a website is a variation of the keyword that is searched.

The questions are:
1) Why does Google display an alternate title in the SERPs?
2) How does Google determine the title to display in the SERPs?

Thanks in advance!

[Tiggerito]

Google tries to display an appropriate title, so if the supplied one is a poor match it will look elsewhere. Some sources I've seen (from memory) are:


Pages heading
First paragraph text
DMOZ title
Link text from incoming links to the page
Places page business name

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Google decides what is the best to display when a search is done. There is nothing you can do about it other than try and write better titles and meta descriptions.


Matt Cutts explains how Google generates snippets and titles in search results.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlJiLDn9-38


Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

Continued: Changing a site title and description (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624) - Google Webmaster Tools Help

[weegillis]

Google tries to display an appropriate title, so if the supplied one is a poor match it will look elsewhere. Some sources I've seen (from memory) are:

Pages heading
First paragraph text
DMOZ title
Link text from incoming links to the page
Places page business name


They will even use text from the footer if the page is not coherent enough to form a conclusion. I've also seen them use the text in links in the sidebar navigation. Anything to fill the description field with something.

Best advice would be to narrow the focus on your pages, make sure that content and h1 heading is close to the top of the source code, and remove any fluff that exists above it in other parts of the document. Tighten up your description, and keep your keywords list for each page very specific to the page, and short. A little overlap with other pages is okay, as they may be related.

[zeo]

They are trying to match the keyword used by visitor with the most relevant result. If you don't like you DMOZ title to show up:

You can prevent all search engines from using your DMOZ title, using NOODP Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use:

<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP">

I believe Google still supports this tag.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

They are trying to match the keyword used by visitor with the most relevant result. If you don't like you DMOZ title to show up:

You can prevent all search engines from using your DMOZ title, using NOODP Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use:

<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP">

I believe Google still supports this tag.
Considering you copied this from the page I referenced above (but left out the (that support the meta tag) part in the first part) you know darn well Google supports this. <wink>

[rudyespinosa]

Thanks to everyone that responded!
This is excellent information and the video from google that confirms these responses.

Thanks All!