Google automatically adding company name to serp titles

[DougRoberts]

Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I was surprised to see that Google had algorithmically modified my page titles in the search results by adding the company name to the end of the (short) title.

<title>About Us</title> became  About Us - Company Name

Interestingly, this wasn't consistent - sometimes it was "company name Limited" and sometimes just "company name.

Anyone else notice this or is this a recent change?

[EGOL]

Google has been doing this for a while.

Sometimes they add your URL to the end of a title tag.

I have some title tags that are short but have my URL at the end.  Google is adding my URL on top of that.  Looks like this.....

Keywords at Egols.com | egols.com

Sometimes they replace your title tag with words that  match the querry.

I object to this because they have overwritten a title tag that with my marketing message such as "free shipping" or a kickass price that pulls in buyers.

[DougRoberts]

Thanks EGOL, I agree it's frustrating, especially as in this case we took the decision to remove the company name from the title...

As well as company names, and URLS/Domain do they use any other "entities?"

[Robbie8299]

Doug,

About 45 days ago I took advise of a user here in the forum to reduce my title tags to one target keyword phrase for each of my city pages (i have about 5000 city pages) and at the time was doing research about adding the "company name" at the end of the title tag if room permitting that it was not to long.

I targeted a lower hanging fruit than my original two keywords reduced my target keyword to one phrase and added our company brand name to the end of the title tags for every page and IMO that was the silver bullet for me along with page content improvements our traffic has increased by 40% and lead conversions have also increased on our site.

And at the time this user told me it was a good idea to add my company name to the title tags and reduce to one target keyword I was researching my competitors and a few of them where already doing this so i figured why not give it a try? It has definitely worked for us and instead of fighting for placement on page two of Google we are now for most searches on page one in the top five results for all of them!

SEO success story for sure using seo moz tools and taking some really good advice from a real expert on this forum.

Oh and also Google use to change my title tags also just as you mentioned...I can no longer find pages where Google is re writing them anymore. So I guess I did something right.

Good luck!

[DougRoberts]

Thanks for sharing your experience!

The title tags on the site in question were being automatically generated by the content management system. Due to the particular subject matter some titles tend to be quite long so it was decided to drop the company name which was being automatically appended and is itself rather long.

Unfortunately I don't have total discretion to modify page titles as I see fit, which makes things interesting!

I'm now implementing custom <title>tags so that the company name can be appended where it needs to be, in a consistent manner and drop it from the longer titles that need to take precedence. The company name isn't added to the longer titles.</p> <p>I agree that keeping your title short and specific helps, and adding the company name can boost trust and click-through.</p> <p>I guess we all need to remember to regularly check the titles being displayed in the SERPS and to really make an effort to educate content creators about creating good titles.</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>