Even though I have <title> tag, Google show the name of the link instead of the actual title in results

Question

I noticed today that in some cases in the google results of my page, some of the title results are shown not with the <title> tag, but with the link name.

Fore example if the contact link is contact and the title is hi let's talk google chooses to show the contact

I have noticed this when I submitted my updated sitemap that contains the translated pages, for example I have an english version and an italian version. This strange thing is shown in the italian version.

What can I do about this ?

Answer 1

I am not sure about how Google might treat an Italian site, however, I rather suspect the process is the same. So I will continue.

In your case, Google likely does not like the title as provided in the title tag. It is important that the title tag is not too short or too long and that the title tag be carefully crafted especially when using the pipe character. There may be other conditions under which Google will not use the title as given as a SERP link.

In your case, Google is likely looking to traditional pages and traditional links. Certain pages have special importance; About, Contact, Company Info, Privacy Policy, and so on, that have been treated somewhat differently in the original parser models where pages were read top-to-bottom like any page in a book. These pages were different in that there were expectations put upon them by users. Contact, for example, would have contact information and special agents (as in the AI tradition) were used to extract contact information. Perhaps part of what you are experiencing is related to this. Who knows for sure?

What we can say is this. If you craft your title tag for length, you should be fine. Here are some answers I have given in the past that may help you to understand what is going on.

Speaks to how Google can change SERP links. Title tag different from title appearing in Google?

Speaks to the title length. My title tag doesn't appear to be getting crawled by Google properly

Speaks to the title length. Title in Google does not match <title> of document

Answer 2

Going by your example, I will guess that google chooses the word "contact" over "hi let's talk" as a title because your page probably has the word "contact" more than once and it sounds more professional.

But if you want a good chance at having your title as the title in search results, then you want to make it related to your page. This means having keywords from your title appear in your page. All the better if the match is word for word in exact order.

Go here: http://www.seoworkers.com

Then put the URL of the page you have a title issue with, and you'll see a section in the results about title relevancy.

The results will tell you how many characters are in the title and its opinion. I'd aim for no more than 65 characters per title. And you want to make sure the title relevancy to the page is 100%. Also in the result is a video by Matt Cutts that talks about title tags.