Page Title restructuring

[SCW]

Hey Mozers!

Surely you have noticed Google has been randomly restructuring our Page Titles to emphasize branding by placing the company/brand first, as opposed to after the "|" - a convention we had been accustomed to.

I am wondering if the aforementioned warrants restructuring our client's (where branding is important) Page Titles as per Google's lead, or simply staying on the sidelines for now and letting Google do it?

Anyone care to share their take on this?

Thanks!

Dino

[danatanseo]

I haven't noticed this on the sites that I manage. The only time I've had Google construct a title has been when the title we wrote was too long. I have seen many instances where Google is extracting an excerpt from the "description" as market up with Structured Data instead of using the meta description we have written. I find this frustrating because we have recently spent a good amount of time optimizing our meta descriptions and now, the majority of the time, Google seems to be favoring what we've marked up with structured data.

Have you examined your titles to see if perhaps there is a reason that Google is doing this? Could it be an idosyncracy of your CMS perhaps, or if not, could it be that something was programmed internally to insert the brand at the front of the tag programmatically? Just some thoughts!

Dana

[Ron_McCabe]

Dino,

I would check out this QA string as it covers exactly what you are concerned about:http://moz.com/community/q/page-title-structure

I would definitely check out the SEO cheat sheet they references in the string.

Ron

[RobMay]

First, Google doesn't do this for an entire site, at any given time, so it's best you take the time to work on client sites/pages and optimize the TITLES and DESCRIPTION you want to use. If Google uses /or changes anything for pages you have written descriptions, titles or page content, they won't advise you either.

Google's updates of these page titles, is very common when they feel the title they use for the SERP index to be more useful or accurate of the page's content. Watch for very long titles, as they are more prone to being identified by them, and rewritten

Yes, it can be quite frustrating, but it's not a total loss when working on sites.

Even if Google does change something, you can still make changes to the client site pages that might have been rewritten by Google, and hope that your new updated page info is taken over the Google TITLE rewrite..

This was a good post on BLOG. SEOmofo had a really good posting as well about this very topic.

Barry had a small but good to the point post on Google Title Rewrites at SE Round Table too

Hope some of this helps point you in the right direction!

Cheers,