Inconsistent page titles in SERP's

[RBO]

I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page.

Examples

http://www.atexopleiding.nl

Meta title:                    Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl

Title in SERP:             Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring

http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde

Meta title:                    Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen

Title in SERP:             Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen

http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/

Meta title:                    Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA

Title in SERP:             VCA Examens – PBNA

I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code.

Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why:

• Cookiewall was implemented end of January
• The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date.
• Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes.
• The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay

However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :).

What do you think?

[RBO]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for your tip. That could very well be the case here, although I need to know for sure before I settle with this interpretation.

Take this search for example:

https://www.google.nl/search?q=opleiding+veiligheidskunde&aq=f&oq=opleiding+veiligheidskunde&aqs=chrome.0.57j60l3j62l2.5126j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I searched for "opleiding veiligheidskunde" and it should be an exact match with the actual page title. Though Google shows only "Veiligheidskunde" in the SERP, which can't be argued to be a better match than "opleiding veiligheidskunde". On top of that we've gone down from pos. 4 to 6 in the past couple of weeks for this keyword.

That's why I'm concerned that Google not only displays another title, but our rankings are also influenced because it's not an exact match anymore.

[simon_realbuzz]

It may be as simple as the fact that Google doesn't always display the page title that you want to display. As pointed out in this article Google can change the title it displays in SERPs depending on the terms actually searched for.