Google displays body-text as headline in the SERP

I recently read a post on (I think) the Google webmaster central blog or some other Google source but I be damned if I can find it! But essentially it was about how Google will pull body text to display as headline in the serp if the page title tag is empty.

The page title is generally seen as one of the most important on-page aspects from an SEO-perspective. It is a strong indicator to search engines as to the topic of the page. It also important from a users (searcher) point of view, if the title tells the user that this page possibly contains the information he´s seeking than he will probably click through. For these reasons the page title is something we all should pay extra attention to. But there are many cases of page-titles being empty or non-relevant. How are these handled by Google?

Google has previously  stated in the webmaster central, Anatomy of a search result, that “Occasionally (generally when the title tag is not meaningful or the page is not crawlable) Google will pull the title from the anchor text of a link to that page, or from the Open Directory Project.” This is something that we´ve seen many times for pages with empty or non-relevant title tags like “page”.  

We actually saw it for our own Qualified Google Advertising Professional-page (on adwords.google.com) which for a while accidently was linked to from our website with an image with alt-text “Sempo Qualified Partner”. When conducting a search on Google for” Sempo Qualified Partner” our Qualified Google Advertising Professional – page showed up with the title in the SERP being “Sempo Qualified Partner” which was quite hilarious!  

What´s new (to me anyway) is that Google now is searching through the body-text of the web-page for a relevant text to display as title in the search engines result page (SERP). Candidates for the title are page-headlines (<h1>, <h2> etc.) if available but also bolded or italic text. For a snippet to be chosen it needs to be relevant for the actual content of the page.

Does this mean that the page title will be replaced or altered depending on the query much like the Meta Description text? No, my understanding of this is that this will only be used in case the page title is empty.

If someone finds the actual post I´m referring to please let me know where it´s at by commenting on this post.