[onion2k]

On the website of the company I work for, the title is "tagline | company name" but in the search results it shows up as "company name: tagline". That style doesn't appear on the company website anywhere.

I imagine it's Google trying to normalize how things are shown but it's quite annoying. It could potentially break some company's branding.

[zbrozek]

Shrug. The almost-religious belief in the necessity for ultra-consistent branding within some companies is nearly comical so long as you're on the outside.

[Jcampuzano2]

Sadly agreed. Definitely not comical when I have multiple times had our marketing department blame/throw fits at the dev team for the site not showing up in Google's search results exactly how they want it to.

[shadowgovt]

To be fair to the devs, that's an education gap. The response should be "You want us to develop a solution to a third party's whims? Maybe you should try writing them a nice letter about how their representation of our company affects our image; it'll have as much impact. Possibly more."

In real corporations, of course, that's not how it works because the tech people are "wizards" and Google is "part of the wizard stuff," but this isn't a technical problem (and maybe marketing needs to stop trying to control another company; that's no more likely to succeed than Coke yelling at Amazon that they don't always put Coke products at the top of every search result).

[onion2k]

It's relatively minor for most businesses, but sometimes it isn't. Inconsistent messaging makes it a lot easier for someone to set up a phishing attack against your customers. My bank uses several different URLs, email sending addresses, and taglines for its services. It's not always easy to tell if an email is actually from the bank.

Google adding more permutations into the mix doesn't help.

[nightpool]

Google changing the way title tags are formatted on their SERP is not the reason that your bank's customers are falling for phishing attacks.

[onion2k]

Of course not. I didn't say it is. It's a whole bunch of things. Google changing things is one very small factor.

But it is a factor...