Google Generating its Own Page Titles

[dancape]

Hi There

I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening?

Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title?

Thanks

Sadie

[dancape]

Great, that could be it, thanks so much for the response,

[AndreVanKets]

Hi,

If your title tag is too long, or if it contains to many similar words (or repeated words/phrases) Google will use what it thinks is better.

Keep your title tags short and descriptive and don't include too many different keywords 2 at most in my opinion.

Greg

[JoelBurke]

Hi Sadie,

How long are your title tags? A new algorithm change that happened over the summer affects the way truncated titles appear in the SEPRs. The highlights: any title that is over 68 characters is no longer cut off and truncated; instead Google can produce a title algorithmically if the title element is too short or too long. If we would like to have control over the title item, that it must be within the new requirements (25ish to 68ish characters) This  represents one possible solution, I hope it helped.

Here are the details from the update:

• "Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We'll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one."

http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html

Cheers!

J