Some SEOs are noticing Google add to their title tags that are displayed in the Google search results snippet’s headline a city name. Lily Ray posted about this on Twitter and said “I’ve seen Google modify title tags many times, but this is the 1st time I’ve seen Google append a city name to a title tag for a generic service page it *thinks* should have a local intent.”

Here is her generic screen shot of this, so you can understand what is happening:

The NYC part is added, not part of the title attribute, in the source code.

I know Google can do whatever they want with titles and snippets but I don’t know if I’ve seen this behavior for generic landing pages.

Others have not seen this as well:

Have you seen this?

Don’t forget, the new snippet controls should roll out the end of this week.

Forum discussion at Twitter.