Summary: Google is also showing lowercase title tags in some search results. 

Anyone who was at the Search Engine Smackdown (or was it a Site Clinic) session in PubCon will have remembered a few interesting moments, including the poor lady who had about a dozen description tags for her Day Spa and had difficulty finding a good SEO, and the Dollar Stretcher site that was having trouble with Yahoo changing their titles into all lower case. [Click here for post-post update]

Matt Cutts then suggested that perhaps it was an issue with Yahoo Site Explorer, a few others suggested it might have something to do with cloaking (and was a sign that the site was being penalized), and recently there has been more than a few threads and blog posts about how it might have to do with anchor text.

While working with a client recently to take care of some of their canonical URL issues, I noticed something strange on Google:

[Update: Thanks to some help from Michael Gray I was pointed to a few things that slipped by, including the old Real Goods domain that was redirected, but which still had the dev. portion of the site indexed in the SERPS. Then there was a mirror site from years ago that I asked a long time ago to have redirected, but which was not using a proper 301. Always check your http status codes people! Anyway, my thought is that Google has flagged that section of the site for these reasons, but it wasn’t anything serious enough (or perhaps the domain is authoritative enough to get away with it) for them to penalize the site. These issues are going to be taken care of tomorrow before I even finish my first cup of coffee, but it all still raises some very interesting questions. Michael pointed out a few things that I should have seen right away, but sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to see the forest through the trees. Thanks again Wolf Man!)

Upon viewing the actual page, you will see that the title is capitalized. You may have also noticed that there is no cached link. Believe me, there is no funny business going on here. It is the same situation that was noticed with the other site on Yahoo. Another interesting thing to note is the lack of description.

You may be wondering if the title was capitalized recently. Perhaps Google hasn’t had time to reindex the new version. The answer is no. The page title was simply “Real Goods” before, and I added in the title you see on that SERP myself - With CAPS!

To complicate matters… (I have it fixed the duplicate URL problem since posting.) As stated above, I’m working to fix some canonical URL problems with certain pages on this website. Due to a series of rewrites and redirects using ISAPI plug-in on Windows and an antiquated e-commerce system, fixing this is not as easy as it is for most sites. So what we have is a double-listing. One for http://www.gaiam.com/realgoods/ and the other for that URL plus the file name default.htm.

The first listing shows the new title, but it is all turned to lower case, and the listing does not show the description. The second listing shows the old title, and a few lines of content from the page since the designer neglected to put up a description. Another thing worth noting is that the Cache date of that page is after the date that I put up the new title and description, which are not showing.

Despite the issues with duplicate content, multiple versions of the same URL, etcetera… Is there any reason you can think of for Google to show a lower case title when it is actually written in Upper Case?

Question: Do you think it has anything to do with the mixture of HTML and XHTML meta tags? For instance, the end of the title tag is “> and the end of the description tag is “  /> .