Page title in Google search is defferent

[anubis2]

Hello,

Google changes the title of the main page only for my sites in this way:

What I configured: My page title | my site name

How it shows in Google: My site name: My page title

If I checked some meta tags analyzer it will show my configured page title and also in Bing.com

So what do you thing about it.

Best Regards,

Housam

[fiberglass]

This has to do with Click Thru Rates (as well as visitor performance metrics once a user lands on the page) and what Google thinks serves as a better Title.

In a nutshell, Google is providing a better page title for you.  For you, this means create a better page title.  Look at your search queries in Google Webmaster Tools.  Look at your particular landing page and notice the differences the main search impression keyword phrases and the Page Titles that Google ends up delivering in search results.

Use this to your advantage to optimize click thru rates.  It's likely that they think your brand name so much coincides w/ your product, that you may be better off using it in the front of the Title, instead of at the end.

Hard to say w/out knowing more specifics, but we're about to publish a piece on this topic regarding leveraging Page Titles for increases in click through rates -- one of the main problems is the fact that Google keeps modifying them.   Turns out, that's a good thing though!

[ChrisAshton]

As the other replies mentioned, this is very normal. Anecdotally, it seems this happens most commonly if the brand name is more relevant for that search. Essentially they've decided for one reason or another that putting your brand first is likely to give you more SERP clicks.

I don't think we've ever had a concise explanation from Google as to exactly why this happens but either way, it's not something to be stressed about. If your page titles were being completely dropped in place of Google-generated ones this may be an indication that yours need some serious revision (depending on context) but in this instance it's fine.

[EGOL]

Google monkeys with my page titles a lot.

At first I thought that they were stinking up my smart marketing, but now I think that they might use the query string and toss up a title that will better elicit clicks.

[Ria_]

This is extremely common. Are your competitors' titles in the search results displayed the same way? e.g. "Website: Page Title". If so, I'd bet that if you checked their source, Google would have changed it for them too. In which case, not sure if there's anything you could do about it. Google just seems to have preference for brand name first when it comes to some search queries where they deem the brand name more important to the user than the page title for that particular query.