Google Adding / Manipulating Page Meta Titles?

[Spindle]

We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?

[Dr-Pete]

For a while, Google has been auto-appending brand names (or their best guess) in that "Title Goes Here - Brand" style, even when "- Brand" isn't in the title tag. There's no way to tell them not to do that, unfortunately. When they launched the redesign to the wider column, it seems like title rewriting increased, IMO.

So, the weird question here, clearly, is why does Google think your company is called "0 Reviews"? It could be an old legacy bit of bad data somewhere, like DMOZ (as Russ said), or it could be something they're seeing on-page or in inbound anchor text. Unfortunately, without being able to see the site, this kind of thing is really tough to diagnosis.

[AdamThompson]

The only thing I would add to what Russ says is to check the length of your page titles. Google seems more likely to modify overly long or short page titles. We've had some success getting Google to stop modifying the page title by writing our own page title that was the ideal length.

Another thought: do you have schema.org or other reviews markup on the page? I wonder if Google is pulling the "0 reviews" from that.

At the end of the day, Google gets to decide how to display your page title, which can be frustrating!

[rjonesx. 0]

Google has often taken liberty with the title tags as displayed in the SERPs, drawing from varied sources including content on the page, named entities, DMOZ titles, anchor text of links pointing to the page, etc. The only thing you can do is try and create meaningful, relevant, optimized and sufficiently unique titles that attract users such that Google doesn't try and switch them out.