Title not showing in Serps

[newstd100]

Sorry if I've posted in the wrong section; in a nutshell my page title for 2x key terms (that I've noticed) is not showing in the Serps for my listing. Instead, the keyphrase I'm searching for shows up, and in one case my site name is appended.

Can anyone tell me why this is? If I take a stab in the dark, i'd plum for Gg not thinking my page title is up to scratch for the particular search term.... but that's just a punt.

Any help, greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[SteveOllington]

How long ago did you change it?

[SteveOllington]

*Post duplicated and won't let me delete

[newstd100]

Probably wasn't making myself very clear; I haven't changed the page titles (in question) since the site launched - c18months ago, and my pages were showing in the Serps with the titles I'd pulled together. Then, suddenly ... well recently, my listings in the Serps now have different page titles to those on the page itself.

Any clearer?

[SteveOllington]

How strange, I just posted here and it's deleted itself lol.

Anyway, yes I have seen that exact same thing happen once and only once, though the title tag was just a couple of months old, it had been indexed before with the correct one before changing itself.

It did sort itself out in the end but I have no idea what caused it. My guess is that if you leave it a week you'll see it's back to how it should be.

[EGOL]

Google is doing this to some of my titles.   They are manufacturing a title that is "KeyWord  domain.com".

I like this because it emphasizes my keyword and a domain that I am proud of... however, I wrote my title tag in a way that I thought would elicit more clicks.

[KeriMorgret]

Google puts in its own titles at times, and has been doing so for some time. This post at Search Engine Roundtable will help explain things a little, and show you that you're not alone.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

[SteveOllington]

Really? How long has this been going on?

I gather it's not too common place.

Thanks for the article I'll read that now.

[SteveOllington]

That's interesting, it says it does it when:

"(1) titles are particularly short, (2) titles are shared across large parts of your site and/or (3) titles appear to be mostly a collection of keywords."

But I'm guessing none of those were the case with your sites EGOL, they must be taking it a step further now... bit cheeky.

[EGOL]

No, my titles were unique and verbose and much better than Google's substitute! 

[SteveOllington]

As I suspected. They'll be modifying our content for us next! lol