How do you influence the default site title?

[seoeuroflorist]

Hi,

We have noticed that on brand searches, a site's page title is replaced with the name of the site or the business, we can understand that this is due to the fact that a CTR enticing title is not as important when the customer is looking for a certain brand.

What tells Google what company name to display in this instance?

We're having trouble with our French site displaying the page title, we are moving the position of the title code earlier in the page, but can't see why a) Telefleurs is not displaying the title chosen and b) why it is displaying EuroFlorist when our French brand is Telefleurs.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Sam

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[Dr-Pete]

It used to be that titles only came from two sources - the <title>tag and DMOZ. If the organic result title didn't match the title tag, then you'd check DMOZ. Unfortunately, now Google pulls data from all over the place, including Google+ listings and the Knowledge Graph. Google has become very interested in understanding brands as entities and is bringing a lot of data into play, sometimes poorly.</p></title>

[seoeuroflorist]

Hi Dr Pete,

The UK site seems to consistently display the title we've chosen without being rewritten, it is our French site that was behaving oddly.

Since posting this, we've rewritten the page title and it seems to be displaying what we would like it to on keyword searches, what we found weird was that it was using the company/brand name on keyword searches, where we would expect this to only happen on brand searches.

What I'm wondering is how does Google know what the name of the brand/company is in order to alter it for a brand search?

[Dr-Pete]

This is an increasingly common, and often frustrating, problem. Google will take liberties with title tags, especially to show brand information. This most likely explains the second result. You could try shortening that home-page title a bit, removing the duplication of "Flower(s)" and putting the brand at the end. Google might be seeing that title as a little bit keyword-heavy. It's not a penalty sort of thing, but it makes them more likely to rewrite.

The other example, though, for the French site, is definitely odd. Could you tell us what search you're running when you see that? Is it on Google.fr?

[KevinBudzynski]

See below. Google doesn't always nail this. I'm guessing that if it's Google isn't getting EuroFlorist  from one of your pages. It's from another source. If you query "telefleurs EuroFlorist " a bunch of results. This could be the other sources.

Form: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

"We may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. "