There is a major conceptual and legal difference between selectively displaying content we created ("snippets"), and Google actually altering the content we created ("title").
To top it all, there seems to be no recourse or opt-out. I have run usability session on our site, you have not.
The titles changed by Google did not fall in any of the categories you mention - which could arguably make it ok to modify the page title.
I'm going to assume there is a character or word count that can be triggered that flags for spam / black hat.
Would love to hear from Matt on this one.
I respect and appreciate your explanations, Matt, after I'd checked the keywords ranking fluctuation by using RankTracker. Many times googlebot and robot.texts selected from snippet as their crawled keywords. I compare it at three (3) points of checking location; RankTracker, Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
Matt,
If I understood you correctly, you're telling me I can use 100 keywords in my title and they will be counted in the page's scoring. Plus, as an added bonus, Google will alter the page's SERP snippet to make my title more user-friendly and potentially increase click-through.
Hopefully I misunderstood, because that seems like a pretty exploitable feature.
What a great explanation about snippets and Titles. Some webmasters don't understand how important a title of the page is and they keep "spamming" by over using the title tag to include all of their keywords.
Now you know how Google treats this kind of black hat SEO or indirect mistakes.