I’ve noticed that Google has been forcing website titles in search results for certain terms, and have done some digging to find out more information on the subject.
One term relevant to my industry is “Bay Area Website Design”. In the screenshot above, three out of four companies using the title syntax:
CompanyName: Services Providedhave had that title picked for them by Google. All three of those companies are conversely using the syntax:
Service Provided - Company NameThe top-ranking result does not provide a company name in its <title> syntax, and that result remains unaltered. Furthermore, a result which ranks for this search term with a sub-page (rather than the home page) also does not have its displayed title altered by Google.
The reason for this is explained on this Webmasters help page and summarized below:
We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We may also use publicly available information - for instance, anchor text or listings from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) - or create rich snippets based on markup on the page.