Google Algorithm change? - Brand name now overwriting title tag?

[mattylac]

Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion...

"Site name: page title"

I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly.

I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far.

Edit:Some links talking about the subject

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html

http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/

[TalkInThePark]

I am seeing this too, Google flips the order of our brand name and our USP in our homepage title.

"USP - Brand Name"

now becomes

"Brand Name: USP"

[Francisco_Meza]

Why not just put up the link you are talking about so we can see for ourselves?

[mattylac]

Thanks for the response Francsisco.

I do not think this it the case but will test regardless. I am noticing some competitors who are not stuffing and they are also being hit by this.  At the same time, I am seeing a few competitors who are much more likely to be stuffing and they are not being affected.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

Rand, where art thou? Help!

[Francisco_Meza]

That used to happen to me. I changed my title tags to see if Google would display them differently on the next crawl. It didn't work. THen I rewrote them again using completely different keywords and then Google displayed it the way I had written it.

My suspicion as to why this happened to me was I used the words car & auto in the title. I also used rates & cost. Maybe Google thought I was over optimizing my titles. Try it out and see if something changes on your title tags.

[mattylac]

Dana

I read over at searchengineland that Google is testing something. I will try to find the article shortly. Also, it has been noticed by many that this is only affecting websites homepages.

Mat

Google is overriding the title to display as I mentioned above, regardless of how you have it formatted.

And yes, Mathew is the most awesome way to spell our name

[danatanseo]

Hi Mat,

As a matter of habit, we tend to construct our title tags with the configuration you mentioned: Title | Company Name

I just checked our listings as well as many competitors and they are all showing the title tags as normal, and as we've configured them. I'm not seeing anything different right now.

It could be that Google is testing this and may be serving different results from different data centers or to users in certain locations.

Thanks for the heads up though. I'll keep and eye out for anything different and post back here if I see something different.

Dana

[matbennett]

Not currently seeing it from here. I'll check it from some proxies tomorrow.

[SeattleJoe]

I am seeing the same thing happening. Check out the seomoz title in the search results. The company name and title tag are getting flipped.

[matbennett]

Nice to see another Mathew spelling their name the correct way

Are you talking about people structuring their title tags in that way, or Google over-riding the title tag & showing the title in that format in the snippet?