Pages Titles in SERPs - Wordpress Site

[JohnW-UK]

In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.

[csfarnsworth]

Surely is one of the key raking factor.Kindly share the URL of your site and the SEO plugin you are using.

[gazzerman1]

Google will decide what title tag to show for your site, if they feel that your title is not compelling enough they will try different options. They do this mostly when a title tag is full of keywords or phrases and not a readable sentence.

This was actually brought up yesterday in a conversation with John Mueller yesterday.

Many recent experiments show that the Title tag is still a big ranking factor.

[JohnW-UK]

Hello,

The pages I am looking at/that have been totally completely are all the sub pages of the "About Us" section.

This is not the page title.... The page was last updated on the 29/09/13 and last cached on 01/10/13 - Please let me know if I am looking at the wrong information.

Sorry in advance if I am being retarded - I just want to make sure the robots.txt or any other part of the code is causing this problem.

Cheers

[identifying information removed by staff at request of author]

[JohnW-UK]

Hi Gary,

Yes I read this today which is what has prompted my question - I just want to make sure that the site code is doing what it should be and check that something technical is wrong with the site. i.e. Something not marked up properly etc...

See my reply above to get the URL and details.

Cheers

[PinpointDesigns]

Looking at your domain (I've only checked out the homepage at the moment), the Title tag is implemented correctly in the code. That being said, your title tag is very long:

Gary has pointed out some reasons why Google might be ignoring your title tag. I would suspect that because you've exceeded the recommended length (generally 65 characters but up to 69 characters), they may be trying their own titles to see if it works better.

Looking at the search term you've sent over, the title for this page is as follows:

Again, this is too long for Google to show in the search results, so they're probably testing their own version instead of truncating it with ... at the end to see if they can improve your CTR.

[identifying information removed by staff at request of author]

[gazzerman1]

OK here are the issues, stop using hyphens (-) and stop using pipes (|) these is seen as an attempt to stuff words in just for search engines. Google thinks that this will not be a good read for its users and will rename them.

Also please keep in mid that Google does change title tags based on the search query sometimes to give you a better click through rate. They are testing things all the time.

Also make sure your meta tags are the correct lengths for best results, some you have are very short and just one word not great for SEO and others are too long.