What to do when Google Rewrites your Title Tags

• Help! My Web site title tags are being rewritten by Google. I'm filling out the title tag but Google is taking text from the pages themselves and ignoring my title tags completely. Why are they doing this and what can I do to get my own titles to show in the index?

Answer: That's a very good question and the answer is pretty simple...

Google rewrites title tags that in THEIR sole opinion they feel may be too short or are not related to the content on the page.

This question was specifically addressed in two recent Webmaster help threads here and here by Google Engineer John Mueller (JohnMu) and Top Contributor luzie who respectively stated the following:

There are certain situations where we'd replace a title in search results...for example if we find that the same title is used on a number of pages or if the title is otherwise not that good (eg "Home"). - JohnMu

And

Google has only very recently changed the treatment of titles in the SERPs: Whenever a title is repetitive, missing, too short or otherwise inadequate, they change it to read something that they deem more appropriate (som...