Google Rewriting Meta Description and Titles

[becool]

Google has been "rewriting" my meta descriptions and titles with increasing frequency across multiple inner pages on a particular site I am working on. By "rewriting" I am referring specifically to Google (i) ignoring my selected descriptions and instead selecting portions of the pages' content to serve up as the pages' description in the SERPs and (ii) with respect to titles in particular, displaying the bulk of my selected titles but adding certain qualifiers (i.e. additional words) to the end of titles (e.g. "- Bob's Plumbing Parts Store").

In an effort to try and stop or mitigate the "rewriting" of my descriptions and titles, I have varied the meta descriptions and titles and have tested various lengths and I've slightly tweaked the pages' content (and specifically placement thereof) but do not seem to have much control over the descriptions and titles shown in the SERPs for my site's inner pages, whereas the competing sites seem to have their selected descriptions and titles displayed in the SERPs. Frankly, I have also tried modeling my descriptions and titles off of the competing sites' descriptions and titles and that has not really remedied the problem either.

I am interested in your experiences with this. Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[CCarter]

This has been going on for nearly 8+ years. You are not going to be able to stop them from doing this since they believe they understand their audience better.

It also is a way to mitigate spammers who over stuff their titles and descriptions with self-promotion or sales content.

I can tell you from experience and watching 1+ million search results daily for 5+ years, it usually happens with keywords which have some good volume. Rarely does it happen when you have a brand name in the query or with a low volume search - at least with the title tag. Usually they keep those titles as the site owner inputted it.

However with the description they will usually take pieces of the content which they think are relevant for the querying user's results and disregard your meta description.

 

[Future State]

They rewrite them depending on the query (especially the meta description). You want them to do this. They increase CTR for you. It's probably among the easiest things for them to measure:

"When meta title and meta description have keyphrase, CTR increases"
"When meta title has brand name at the end, CTR increases due to trust"

I feel like I read recently that they're going to allow you to opt-out of this in the new Search Console at some point. I wouldn't.