Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is an important metal-oxide semiconductor for photocatalytic applications due to its unique properties, such as photostability, low cost, abundance and nontoxicity. Despite of outstanding functionality, wide band gap of 3.2eV limits its application due to ultra-violet (UV) range absorption. In order to extend photo-excitation energy down to visible range, intensive efforts have made to manipulate bandgap of TiO₂. In this study, we synthesized self-carbon doped TiO₂ nanorods (C-TiO₂ NRs) through hydrothermal synthesis to increase the absorption of visible light. Additionally, using the surface plasmonic resonance effect of gold nanoparticles, the photoelectrode was fabricated to increase the absorption of visible light. Then, TiO₂ passivation layer deposited using the electro deposition to protect gold nanoparticle, which is typically vulnerable to photocorrosion. The synthesized C-TiO₂ NRs/Au/TiO₂ was characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). We confirmed that C-TiO₂ NRs have rutile phase and the size of Au NPs is about ~10nm. UV-visible measurements confirmed the optical bandgap of the photoanode at the significantly lowered photon-energy. We carried out the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to identify presence of carbon species and chemical oxidative states of C-TiO₂ NRs. We investigated the PEC water splitting properties under 1sun illumination. We observed that C-TiO₂ NRs/Au/TiO₂ (1.6mA/cm²) show ~2 times higher current density than C-TiO₂ NRs (0.75mA/cm²) and enhanced stability of photoelectrode.