With all our talk about the importance of title tags, this one comes as a bit of shocker - many webmasters are complaining that Google is ignoring title tags in certain situations and generating its own titles for search engine results. That means that the carefully keyworded, clickthru-optimized titles that you wrote for your pages might not show up when someone searches for your site on Google.
Don't worry, though: they'll always show up on your own site! This may mean that Google is giving less (or no) weight to the keywords and order of title tags, which probably makes sense given that Google focuses pretty much exclusively on page content. Also, Google's own Chrome browser happens to do a terrible job of displaying titles in its tabs if you've got more than a few tabs open, so it's possible that Google feels the tag itself isn't as important as it used to be.
More than likely, though, Google is treating the title tag the way that it began treating the meta description tag a few years ago: it decides what to do with it based on an algorithm. If it's good, brief and non-spammy, Google uses it, but if it looks loaded with keywords, or perhaps over-optimized for click thru, Google will ignore it and create its own. I'll keep you posted on this one....
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