Can Google display a diffrent page title?

[First-VehicleLeasing]

Hi if I search google UK for the phrase car leasing, google returns my listing as

Car Lease Deals

However the same search on Yahoo or Bing bring back

Contract Hire | Vehicle & Car Leasing Deals | Car Lease Deals

this is the real page title. Why would this happen?

Thanks

Andy

[BailHotline]

To my understanding, no Google does not display titles dynamically, unless, of course the developer used Javascript or something. In any case it would be bad SEO practice and they wouldn't rank. My only guess would be caching maybe? Very odd indeed.

[KaneJamison]

Yup, they've been changing title tags for at least a year now. Here's a Google Webmaster Blog post about it from Jan 2012:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/better-page-titles-in-search-results.html

[BailHotline]

Wow nice! great info Kane, thanks for the link.

[First-VehicleLeasing]

Hi Kane thanks for your speedy answer. Is this a good thing or a bad thing from my perpective.

Thanks

Andy

[KaneJamison]

Neither. Bad that you have less control over them, but potentially good that Google is showing something different, if it results in more clickthroughs. Unfortunately there is no way to test for that that I'm aware of, at least not while they're changing the title.

I'm not the type that recommends relying on Google to pick the best title for your page, but to be honest, "Contract Hire | Vehicle & Car Leasing Deals | Car Lease Deals" is fairly keyword heavy, and isn't that attractive to click on. A title like "Car Lease Deals" might do better in terms of clickthrough rates, but that's just my speculation.

Changing the title tags seems to be Google's answer to SEO-focused title tags that are packed with keywords, and I think it's a good thing for users. Hard to say for webmasters, but at the moment they don't give us any choice in the matter, since I don't believe they give us the option to turn it off.

This paragraph is speculation on my part: They're likely going to be changing the title based upon (A) things the user is looking for and (B) what else your page says. So if the user looked for "vehicle leasing deals", Google might choose to show that portion of your title tag. On the other hand, they might choose to show "Car Lease Deals" if that phrase is more common on the page and used in header tags, etc.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

To add my experiance to this, it seems to happon more commonly when it feels your h1 or the serch term e.t.c. is more relivent to the search.

Depending on the search, it can harm or hurt. In terms of ranking for your keyword it shouldn't be a problem, but clickthrough wise it is more iffy.

[KeriMorgret]

Actually, Google often changes title tags, especially based on the query. They've been doing this for a couple of years now.