Google is not respecting the meta title

[ofuente]

We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title>

In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an

in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question):

<hgroup>

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Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup>

Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now

The point is that google has considered that this particular

is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com".

Two things for which this is even more strange are the following:

• while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others?

• the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last?

What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10

on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after.

Provided this situation, we would like to know:

1. is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people?

2. why is it happening? Is it somehow related to

,

<hgroup>and

?

3. why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages?

4. more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow?

Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received!

AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232

</hgroup>

[KeriMorgret]

Google has been rewriting page titles for years, even on sites like Apple.com. Sometimes it's to better match user intent with the search, and sometimes it's because they think your title tag is spammy. Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has several pieces on this.

[ofuente]

Thanks for your answer, David.

I believe they should respect what we, brands and developers, set as the important elements for our users. Although, it's their platform and they'll try to do what's best for theirs... (but they're not always right unfourtunately!).

[ofuente]

Thank you for your answer, Dan. Hopefully, they'll get better at predicting a title; because in this case it's quite bad chosen.

[ofuente]

We'll try this solution. It looks like it'll help.

Actually, we tried to get rid of the meta title, but our developer insisted in not removing it for some reason.

[MattAntonino]

Some people disagree with my advice on this but from what I've seen, it works 85-90% of the time:

1. Remove name="title" content="Conoce los profesores de Startups | Open IEBS "/> as this is a virtual duplicate of <title></span><span>Conoce los profesores de Startups | Open IEBS </span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>

2. Add  to the header.

I think if you do both these things, next time Google crawls your page, they should use your title.

[Kingof5]

I've seen this with our sites too. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, robots.txt, etc. should all be considered just suggestions. Google will look at them and in most cases obey them, but they don't always.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Oscar

Sorry not a direct or full answer but just to let you know i have definately seen a few instances of this too i.e. Google coming up with their own titles and replacing the pages actual title tags.  If they think they can write a better title than whats in the tag they sometimes do

Cheers

Dan