The example you give is where that site uses exactly the same title tag across its site (doh) – one of the extreme cases Matt talks about where Google chooses a more appropriate title. However I think it’s fair to assume that even in those rare cases, optimising title tags yourself is going to have more impact on relevance and ranking than allowing Google to do this. I would be prepared to put money down that if that site sorted out their title tags their rankings would go up despite this.

Great spot though and I’m now just going to stand in the corner and be embarrassed by thinking this was a joke

@eduard: i’ve seen it before too, but as you said, they used H1 tags. But in this case they used linktext. Of course, the outcome isn’t any different, but the main issue is that you can rank a topspot on a keyword you haven’t optimized the page for. And i don’t blaim Google for doing anything wrong, cause the result is perfectly relevant to the query, but title tags become way less relevant this way.

@jaamit: I wish it was an April fool’s joke. That’s why I posted it yesterday instead of today (and risking Sam Murray’s wrath by pushing his superb post down on the site).

@Eduard: thanks! I’ve updated the post with a link to that video. Thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t seen it before.

I’ve encountered this for the first time half a year ago. (I wrote about it on my Dutch blog: http://www.edwords.nl/2009/11/05/google-combineert-h1-titel-zoekresultaten/)

Shortly after that Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video in which he said Google allows themselves the right to change titles if 1) it’s too generic, 2) if it’s the same on every page, 3) there’s no title and 4) Google ‘thinks’ another title would be more relevant.

Find the video here. Let’s see if I can embed it here as well: