Live Search and Meta Title Display in SERPs

[CaliforniaGirl]

It was brought to my attention yesterday a strange implementation in the Live search SERPs.

Doing a site: search on domain is showing results where the title on SERPs is not the meta title as defined in the code but rather picking up a div elemement with a class defined as "title".

Y and G are not doing this and those results are as expected.

Has anyone seen this? Can anyone shed light? Do you suppose it is a glitch with Live/MSN algo?

Any help would be appreciated.

CaliGirl

[AussieWebmaster]

Can you show us an example... what were you search for

[Jazajay]

I suppose it would have to be a serious glitch in the algo.
If you think of it like this -

<title>your title</title> is the same as $title=your title. Bare with me please.

The Search Engine's then puts the title varaible for that page into it's DB.
INSERT INTO db($siteName,$title,$siteDescription,........);

OK I know the Search Engines don't use PHP but it's the anaology I'm after not the actual coding.

When it then comes to populate the results it selects your site then outputs -

<?php echo $title?><br />
<?php echo $siteDescitpion?>.

So If you then have a div with a id or class as title it COULD overwrite the orginal title that is set in the title element as it is further in the code - precedance.

You said class?
Which class is being set as the title for the page the last class in your code or the first one?

I too would like to see an example, as this to me is slightly hard to belive as therotically the title attribute could overide the title element as that too is setting the title variable if that was the case. In principle.

In fact if this is the case it would have been noticed by now as class="title" or id="title" is quite generic.

Thats the only way I could see this happening though, TBH.

Jaza