Google Changing the Title Tag to Your Brand

[RobDalton]

A while back google started changing our title tags to have our name in it, which was great and reasonable for the most part.  We recently ran into a problem with it as we have some properties on our site that fall under a dba.  Here is the example.

Title tag: Kolea- Waikoloa Vacation Rentals
Kolea is a vacation rental community is a resort called Waikoloa.  Waikoloa Vacation Rentals is our company name and www.waikoloavacationrentals.com is our company site.

Here is the problem:
Title tag: Hualalai Resort- Waikoloa Vacation Rentals
Hualalai is a completely different place than Waikoloa and we do business in there as Hualalai Vacation Rentals, but keep our properties on our www.waikoloavacationrentals.com site rather than microsites.

How can you let google know that what they are doing is incorrect for specific pages?  Thanks,

[FedeEinhorn]

Unfortunately, Google will re-arrange your title in a way they think it would be more appropriate/appealing to users. They usually change the word order, punctuation and god knows what else.

In your example, if the user searches for Waikoloa Vacation Rentals, while your real title is "Kolea- Waikoloa Vacation Rentals" they may change it to "Waikoloa Vacation Rentals: Kolea" and there's nothing you can do to have your title displayed as YOU want it to.

[toddmumford]

This is likely happening because Google is determining that

Hualalai Resort

is a variation of your brand name, Google tends to try and use signals to determine the best title, and somewhere along the way it has picked up signals utilizing that phrase.

What is the official brand name of the company itself?

It is relatively easy to build enough high quality citations to the website utilizing that name, and structure the pages of the site to reinforce that, so that you can influence that title selection.

[xoffie]

Hi

Yes, we're noticing the same, more and more with fresh content the title tag seems to be ignored and replaced with just the domain name. Noticed this more frequently this week, maybe Dr Pete has some news

[MikeRoberts]

If your title is concise and within the 10-70 characters limit (though width of letters can throw that off a bit) then you'll more likely appear with your correct title instead of an altered one. In some cases though, if Google considers your page relevant to a query but doesn't think your title is relevant then they will alter it. This may seem like an issue but can in fact allow you to appear for search terms that you didn't think you were relevant for but are. I've seen this happen on pages for one of the ecommerce sites I work on. When i search for one of our core terms I see the correct title and then a search for a synonym to our core term returns our site in the SERPs with an altered title. In this case its fine because the title wasn't originally optimized to the synonym but Google sees it as relevant, changes it, and allows us to rank well for the term. As far as I know though, there is no way to send Google a notice that they shouldn't alter your title in the SERPs. Google somehow reserves the rights to change how they list your site if it improves the search experience of its users.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Rob,

As the other guys have pointed out, it isn't possible to control when and how Google changes your title tag as far as I'm aware. You can try and send signals to Google such as linking to that page using specific anchor text, on-page copy etc.

I just did a few tests and the correct title tag seems to be appearing so Google may have figured it out and switched back to the correct one.

Are you still seeing them showing the wrong one? If so, could you link to a few examples of search results where this happens?

Cheers.

Paddy