Google Indexing Wrong Title

[tiagosimk]

Hey guys ! I have a wordpress website and also yoast seo plugin . I've set up a meta title which is : TV Online | Assistir Filmes| Notícias | Futebol |GogsTV . (I checked on some free tools to see , and they also show up this) but .... google is showing this : GogsTV: TV Online | Assistir Filmes| Notícias | Futebol . Seems they are trying to show my brand name first instead of my main keyword .

I'm not sure why it doesnt indexes as i want ... Does anybody know how can i fix this . Thanks

[RangeMarketing]

Hi there!

This is a common occurrence for WordPress websites and specifically for home page title tags. Google will often show different variations of titles or completely new titles based on the searchers intent. It makes sense if someone is searching your brand name but it can become frustrating when you want valuable keywords towards the beginning of the title tag instead of your brand name.

Some people argue that this doesn't affect rankings, as in Google is still indexing your proper title tag but is just choosing to display it differently. I personally think the opposite. I've gotten this problem fixed before and have seen better ranking results.

With that said, I would try different variations of your current title to see if Google will accept them. Something like: "TV Online | Assistir Filmes | Notícias | Futebol - GogsTV" or you could work the brand name into the title like "GogsTV Online | Assistir Filmes | Notícias | Futebol."

Hope this helps!

[RobertJakobson]

Google states on their support page:

_If we’ve detected that a particular result has [...] issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. _

There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

What to do? Here's the answer:

• make your title mean something as a sentence or a phrase. List of keywords is not descriptive of what is on the page. Therefore Google will not use that. There are exceptions for e-commerce or product sites but that is the rule.
• If you want to highlight a certain keyword — simply place that at the start of the said phrase in the title.
• try to think as an user searching for your page when composing the above mentioned phrase. What do they desire?

For more, please see my previous answer at http://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-issue-2