Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?

[websurfer]

Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content.

We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently.

So my question...  Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?

[KeriMorgret]

If you figure out a way to do this, you'd be rich! They don't seem to care who they touch, whether it's Apple or SEOmoz of the little site. When I search Google for [negative keywords seomoz] I get back the post that I wrote about negative keywords, and Google has rewritten the title to be "negative-keywords-for-positive-roi - SEOmoz". negative-keywords-for-positive-roi is the URL/post slug! If you use different phrases to search, you'll find the correct post title. Quite frustrating!

[Francisco_Meza]

I agree on this: "Many people aren't in DMOZ, and Google will still alter their meta titles and descriptions to match the search query"

That was my situation.

[KeriMorgret]

Many people aren't in DMOZ, and Google will still alter their meta titles and descriptions to match the search query. Google employees have said that one of the reasons the titles are changed in the SERPs is if they look spammy (not saying that yours are, just stating what they have said).

[alsvik]

We have also experienced this, but after we started using the NOODP-meta tag the problem disappeared. 2 weeks after adding the content="noodp" name="robots" /> to all pages on our site SERP was updated.

Case is, that with inconsistency in you meta tags, Google SERP will show data from dmoz.org (updated:) or using information gathered from your own site, using a H1/H2 as title and ingress text as description.

[Francisco_Meza]

Make sure your title is not nearly identical to your other titles. It took months for me to get rid of that STUPID problem! I went through the source code, changed the titles, built links to that specific page... then 3 months later it finally worked.