Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?

[fablau]

Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results.

Here is an example:

Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page.

And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users.

Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this!

Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks!

Fab.

[cbielich]

Why not change it to the way Google is displaying it? Maybe they like that better

[WesleySmits]

Google tends to scramble the title tag and description tag up if they think that it will serve the user better based on the provided search query.

Sometimes Google changes title tags so they'll contain branding purposes.

Anyway nothing is wrong with Google changing your title and/or description tags. Google always serves what they think is best for the users. I've noticed that they were scrambling my things up too and they actually helped me improve my title tag.

[cbpayne]

Agreed, Google tend to change them when the algorithm perceives that the title of the page is not useful to the searcher. This usually happens when the title is spammy or keyword stuffed. Google is trying to better serve the searcher and not the webmaster by doing this. You need to experiment/split test the title.

[fablau]

Yeah, I can understand that, but how can I test different titles, wording, etc if Google change them anyway? That becomes something hard to test... am I wrong?

[fablau]

I think the way Google change them is often terrible, and I don't understand why it changes my titles and not my competitors' when they are pretty much all alike. I don't see much logic here... anyhow, if this is the way it works and there is nothing I can do about it, that's ok. I will make some more research on this topic. Thanks!

[fablau]

Hmm... I guess I need to test a little bit more on this. That's good to know, thank you!

[cbpayne]

You need to change it to something less keyword stuffed and less spammy looking that you are happy with and see how Google handles it. Experiment.

BTW, you and I may not think your title is keyword stuffed or spammy, but that does not matter - what matters is the algorithm is interpreting it as that, so you need to change it to get the title in the search results that is better than what Google is deciding for you.

[fablau]

Yes, that makes sense... I will do that. Thanks!