Google changes pages' titles not consistently.

[stantyan]

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[Mike.Goracke]

Hi Stan,

I think the reason the first one was rewritten might have been because your actual title is too long. Google limits titles in the SERPs by pixel width, no character count. If you were to change it to this you would be within the character count:

Katadyn Pocket Water Microfilter Review (Video) | Outdoor Gearhead

Same thing with the second page... too long.

And your third page actually appears correctly when you search your entire site with site:outdoorgearhead.com in Google. So I am guessing it is getting rewritten because people probably don't type in, "M.U.L.E hydration pack", they probably use "mule hydration pack"... so I am assuming Google is just trying to appeal to the masses. You could try making this one more descriptive to see if the "." would stick: M.U.L.E. Hydration Pack Reviews | Outdoor Gearhead

Hope this helps.

Mike

[Guest]

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[stantyan]

Thank you for your help, Mike!

Now I will try to optimize titles as much as possible. Also, do you think removing my long site name from titles is a good idea or I should keep it?

[stantyan]

Thank you for your reply, Charles!

What do you mean by "it doesn't even look correctly formatted"? Can you exmplain what's wrong?

I'm using Wordpress SEO to manage all on-site seo formatting. Also, do you think having twitter card, google authorship and open graph tags at the same time is bad for SEO?

[Mike.Goracke]

That really comes down to personal preference.

I personally like company names in the title, as it helps establish branding and provides some authority. For instance, if you changed your 3rd title to remove your company name, "M.U.L.E. Reviews" doesn't tell me a whole lot. I understand it is reviews for something called "M.U.L.E." but I have no idea who is reviewing it or really what a "M.U.L.E." is. If you changed it to something like, "M.U.L.E. Hydration Pack Reviews | Outdoor Gearhead" I would know that "M.U.L.E." must be some kind of hydration pack, that the page is reviewing this type of pack, that the M.U.L.E. hydration pack must have something to do with being outdoors (because of your company name), and that Outdoor Gearhead is the company reviewing this product.

I would recommend removing ".com" from your titles, unless that is part of your company name.

The way I like to think of titles when I create them is that visitors should be able to understand what a page is about without even going there, by looking at the title tag.

Does that make sense?

Mike

[stantyan]

Absolutely agree with you, Mike! I already removed unnecessary ".com" and agree those tag page titles does not give much idea for visitors. Unfortunately, I do not have much control over those tag pages titles in WP.