Google displays multiple titles for same article. What does this mean?

[Greenery]

I've linked to some screenshots so that it what I'm talking about makes more sense.

Sometimes, when I perform a search, I see an article with the correct article title listed as the page title in the SERPs. Other times, I see the wrong page title – it's a generic somethin' or other done by my client's web design company with a bunch of keywords thrown in. The latter (not the correct article title) also appears at the top of the browser tab for every article on my client's site.

I know this is bad, but what can be done about it? This would never happen if my client used Wordpress or some easily modifiable CMS, but they're using a proprietary one maintained by the group that designed the website.

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[davebuts]

Hi Green_Web,

It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.

The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.

If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.

The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.

Cheers,

David