Here is the all-true story of some intriguing events that have transpired at the MozPlex in the last couple of weeks.
It all started when Jamie wanted to look up his fantastic post from last year, "Custom Reporting Using Google Analytics and Google Docs - The Ultimate Analytics Mashup." Not having the URL committed to memory, he did what any of us might do: he Googled it.
Imagine his surprise (and my consternation) when instead of a useful, keyword-rich, call-to-actiony title, he saw this:
For some reason, Google was displaying the text from the unique part of the post URL, rather than the title. A quick survey of Mozzers found that several of us had seen similar results when Googling old blog posts:
But it definitely was NOT happening on all blog posts!
I'm gonna be honest with you guys: I could NOT figure this out. I checked various factors for correlation. Could rel=author be causing this? Was something happening with the way title tags were being generated on the back end of the blog? Nothing seemed to match up.
One factor that I considered, but almost dismissed, was a change in how titles are truncated. The Google Inside Search blog had just released their monthly list of algorithmic tweaks for May, including these 3 that specifically had to do with how titles display:
- "Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We'll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one."
- "Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation. [launch codename "TopOfTheRock", project codename "Snippets"] With this change we've improved the efficiency of title generation systems, leading to significant savings in cpu usage and a more focused set of titles actually shown in search results."
- "Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation. [launch codename "otisredding", project codename "Snippets"] When presenting titles in search results, we want to avoid boilerplate copy that doesn't describe the page accurately, such as "Go Back." This change helps improve titles by avoiding these less useful bits of text."
In short: When your title tag is too long, instead of simply truncating it and adding an ellipsis to the end the way they used to, Google is trying to algorithmically determine a better title for the post.
But surely, I thought, SURELY this wasn't what was happening here. How could a string of words separated by dashes and pulled from the URL be a better title than the actual title? Even a shortened version of the actual title?
My mistake in my initial round of sleuthing was that I ignored Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I tried shortening the title tags and it worked like gangbusters:
What We Learned
Like many blogging platforms, the SEOmoz blog has an option to include a custom title tag. If no custom tag is created, the title tag is generated from the title of the post. We've got some pretty long titles of posts in our library, but many of them had no custom, shorter title - post authors were relying on Google to truncate as needed and focusing more on writing a great headline.
It looks like having a short, search-friendly title tag has increased in importance - without it, Google could replace your title with just about anything, including part of your URL. This doesn't exactly create the user experience we want, and a replaced title tag is a lost opportunity to encourage searchers to click.
How Long Should My Title Tag Be?
There's a great post that just went up on SEOMofo about how long title tags can be and still be displayed in the SERPs. To sum up: the old rule of "70 characters or less" is no longer as hard-and-fast as it used to be. SEOMofo's experiments show that now Google is truncating title tags based not only on number of characters, but also on the pixel width of your title tag. So title tags rich in wide letters like W and A won't be able to fit as many characters in before getting truncated, when compared to title tags rich in narrow letters like i and t.
We'll need to experiment further to figure out exactly where the limit is on title length/width. In the meantime, make sure your pages with long headlines have shorter (still keyword-rich) titles in the title tags, and be aware of your use of wide characters. In my spare time recently, I've been slogging through years of posts and adding shorter titles as needed; I recommend you do the same.
Update: AJ Kohn has more on this topic - including other reasons Google may replace the title tag, such as relevance to the query - over here.
Steps to picking a better title tag than the one provided:Take the page's H1 or existing title tag.Cut it off after 70 characters.How on earth can Google be screwing that up?
I don't envy you having to spend an afternoon trying to figure out why this was occurring - I don't know if I would have come up with the simple solution so quickly...
I think 70 character use in title tag till 2011, Now a day after Google updates i have read some where Google index only 69 characters in 2012 .
I think it's actually even more complicated than that - SEOMofo's experiment saw his title tag get cut off after just 45 characters, all of them very wide, and saw a 107-character title display. Erring on the side of "shorter than ~70, limit super-wide characters" seems to be safest.
Correct. SEO Mofo found out that it is now based on pixel width rather than char length. I believe its 512px as the max. So this is going to depend on your font style and character width.
Even with this and SEOMofos observation we don't know the point where the title becomes a candidate to get replaced. Characters, pixels or something else?
@Alex It won't be on your font style but on what algo Google uses to decide how wide a title is. It's probably as simple as a table of pixel lengths per character, as they want to make fast decisions.
Instead of keeping your title upto 512 pixels (which is the maximum div length of Google), I would suggest to limit it to 500 pixels.
Because when any one search a specific query, google show the specific key phrase in bold letters, which take some more space than normal.
If width of "specific title is 498 pixels" it will become 500 or more pixels when it will appear in front of user (after getting bold for searched terms)
Riddle me this... How many W's can one fit in a title :)
Perhaps it is a measurement of 2" titles... Get your rulers out!
34! :)
34 W = 2" or 34 W = Maximum characters?
Wow! The completely useless art of counting character widths for newspaper headlines that we learned in journalism school has been redeemed after all, when I least expected it!
SEOMofo did an updated research into title length and found its limited to 12 words max to be indexed by google. https://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/google-snippet-08.html So not character length, and not pixel length but # of words? Maybe its a combination of things (pixel length + # of words).
Ah, I don't see any where 70 or 69, still here it's 65... characters.
I think what they're trying to do is, if the title tag is too long, see if there's other shorter text on the page that also better serves the query. Clearly showing the URL is not a good example of that and I'm hoping it's temporary, but at least now we know not to rely on Google to truncate our tags. Probably a good incentive for a lot of us to do some SEO housekeeping :-)
On top of all this, Google decides in many cases that if you're too lazy and don't take the time to write good headlines and meta data, they'll just write a better one for you and display it with your organic listing. Great... so because my competition didn't properly SEO their site, they get a helping hand. Thanks G :)
I think apart from on page factors Google also considers LINKS, Google has replaced some of my page titles with the most important keyword in SERP's when I search for my main keyword, something like this "" Major Keyword - ABC.com"". But at the same time when I search with a long tail keyword Google shows proper title for the same page. In my case Google shows different titles for different keywords.
As far as number of Characters are concerned, I am not sure, Google is showing some of my very long titles(as much as 90 Characters) as it is but either truncate or alter others that were short(50 characters).
That was the part that threw everyone. Re-writing is one thing, but why would you use the URL, when it's the same as the title, only clearly less user-friendly? This isn't so much a point of opinion or a blackhat/whitehat debate - it's just a bug, IMO.
I agree with you Dr.Pete. Now Google wants we should measure the on-page factors by Tailor's measure tap! We shouldn't care about this. Do it as you wish, don't think about what Google will consider. The other case is no-follow. Recently Google said that no-follow attribute can be used decide site's priority. Means there is nothing like Google crawler will not follow that no-follow link. Google is really messing up things.
Our browsers allow us to quickly remember a url regardless of the length of it. I would say, it's pretty uncommon that people write down a full URL or try to remember it, when they can quickly share it via e-mail, msn, skype etc... The URL helps us remind the topic of the page, as by now most of us have been used to reading this-type-of-text.
Its an older post but - I have seen the new google design in opera yesterday (germany is a bit slow... ) and I saw some titles // special with long words in it wich only show up 50 to 55 letters.
well it is a size not a letter count, but even if I found it with a small word (highlight = bold) the title was not as long as it was in the old design I opend at the same time in chrome.
It clearly depends on more than a count of used letters - what I want to say is, it is getting smaller :)
Ruth, I've been seeing something very similar. Amazingly, some of the titles that Google is choosing are darn right GOOD. That's not the case in this example, but at times I've wondered if they were human created!
I've been optimizing for 60 characters rather than 70. That's Bing's recommendation. Now I'll be watching to see if fewer of these are modified.
Thanks for the case study! Well done!
Thanks Dana! I'm hoping that the replacement titles ARE good, and will get better! Still, like a lot of SEOs I'm a bit of a control freak so I'm still going to try to get my own hand-crafted title tag to display whenever I can. 60 characters is a good rule of thumb - especially if we can 2-birds-1-stone it with Bing's SERPs as well.
I doubt they are human created by G - Google does everything by algo but they are getting awfully good at figuring what an article is really about
Hopefully they're just testing a little sumthin sumthin. Clearly that's not a best-case for the users scenario. Extrapolating out down the road what that would mean for url choice, title, title tags, etc - doesn't even lead to a pretty place.
I'm sure that replacing the title tag with the URL is a temporary thing that they're testing - but the larger implications remain, namely that Google will go ahead and replace your title tag with something else if it's too long. I'd hate to put so much work into crafting title tags and have them not even be used.
Google matches the length of the title to the browser you are using. Everything depends on the width of the characters that we use and the browser and its version. I saw a different length of title in Chrome and Firefox. It must fit into the 512 px result box.
Thanks prost - that makes a lot of sense given the move toward responsive web design, especially in light of browsers on mobile phones and tablets. The 512 px number is good to know!
We've always allocated 64 characters to the title tag, but the pixel width issue you mention never occured to me.. time to rethink, and do some testing!
I also find that many of our clients title tags are now only consisting of the brand name in the SERPs, not very good for CTR!
I'm really surprised you guys purged a negative comment and thumbs down. I believe he said "um...duh" which may not be helpful, but kind of true. This has been going on for at least a year and the length of the title is only one factor in Google rewriting tags.
I deleted it because the comment had more than 30 thumbs down and didn't add any value to the conversation. In fact, it was a big distraction. The author of the comment is already in the negative MozPoints column. If he had more input so that a conversation could be had, the comment would have stayed.
Your comment shows that you can say the same thing, in a meaningful way, that adds to the conversation. :) And I thank you for that!
Google certainly has been rewriting tags for a while - the point of my post is less that title rewriting in and of itself is new, and more that the replacement text is looking a LOT less than ideal so it's becoming more important to try to avoid it. We have SEOs at all different levels in the SEOmoz community, and with the URL-in-title-tag experience being both a negative UX and a pretty recent phenomenon, I felt it was worth reminding the community at large to take control of their title tags.
Thanks for giving me something to respond to - I wasn't sure what to say in response to "well, duh."
Fair enough. I think you're right that there are SEOs of all different levels and you did take it to another level talking about the weird substitutions that Google makes sometimes. I'm not saying it wasn't a douchey comment to make, I was just surprised you took it down. But if you feel it's a distraction that is detracting from the convo that's your call. It's your sandbox, we're just playing in it :)
Thanks for the up to date info on titles - will keep a check on title length from now on. Might be worth optimising for some short snappy ones though ?
I never use a title tag that is more than 60 characters. Not only because Google may change it. The keywords a visitor search for, always lights up (they becom heavy). That way you use more pixels which mean that visitors can't read you whole title. That gives no good impression.
The same with meta description you use at a post. It should be less longer than for a site. Because Google puts the date in front of the description. That's way the max. for a blogpost description is with me no longer than 135 characters. Maybe I'm just a control freak ;-)
Google's Probably scared that Facebook will overtake it anytime soon, trying very hard to attract attention with silly codenames as well.
Yes I did read the post by SEOmofo and was shocked to see the change in Google Algorithm regarding title tags. I am on it and trying to test different titles to see how this pixel limit will affect the title tag length.
I think Google is doing so much at the moment so in my opinion it’s too early to decide what exactly Google is up to.
I think this title changing attempt is more to encourage people to create shorter title tag that are more relevant to the content. Incase your title is long enough to bore user; Google will change it to make a shorter version on it. This attempt should be to enhance the user experience (which didn’t seem like working because the alternate titles are quite pathetic that it will reduce the CTR).
I like the idea by James in the comment I guess sticking up to 65 characters (great if you can use H1 as your title tag) is best policy at the moment in order to stay on the safe side from the Google made alternate title tag for your post.
I agree - this seems like a pretty straightforward move toward better UX by Google, not to mention a move against keyword-stuffed titles. Let's hope they work out the kinks and the replacement titles improve over time.
I have been testing this on a few websites recently,
It also can be annoying when Google favours a title over another title on your website for example they will pick the most linked to anchor text as a title for your website, I have seen this a few times where you need to implement the fix around it.
But further to these long titles Google has been doing many changes in the space, in my eyes it is still good to stick with the 65 level title tags across the board.
I just saw this on the latest Matt Cutts search-changes-for-May report. It may explain what you are seeing:
Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We’ll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one.
Thanks! This one of the same 3 bullet points from the May report that I pointed out in the post - the more people I talk to, the more it seems to me like this is what was causing our problem.
For reference to SEO Mofo:https://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/google-snippet-07.html
Also, here is where you can create a title tag and see how it displays based on pixel length:
https://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
I don't pay much attention to length. And for me, when looking at long title tags, there is a difference between what words are searchable, and what words are readable (what is displayed in the 65 char. limit). So I focus simply on use the main word I want to target, look at the main keyword modifiers I want to add, and make it nice and compelling to users to click on. The the meta description closes it with a stronger call to action, regardless of keywords.
I've always gone for 66 characters for some reason. Anyway, just means I have a few characters up my sleeve, particularly if the titles are rich in wider letters as you state.
Look forward to your research and next post on this matter Ruth :)
What happens in the case of e-commerce sites?
For example i work on a site supplying security screws, where it is sometimes imperative to have much more than 70 (or indeed 69) characters in the title of the page in order for it to make sense.. Surely Google cant punish a site for giving its audience ENOUGH information? Would be good to see the anchor text title working more vigorously (should catch out some naughty SEOs to with their questionable links!)
The auto shortening and/or reproduction of any URL based on the context of the story, must be to benefit adwords... makes perfect sense. If you leave a gap, it's the algorithms job to fill based deeper monetization. *biztag
Since December 2100, (when I think they changed the description down to 150) I've been using 66 (or less) in the title and 150 (or less) in the description... works perfectly :-)
I'd like to see an analysis of long titles vs short titles for general topic searches as opposed to exact-match searches for that article. Maybe long titles have more reach?
Great job! I would have not thought of this. Very slick in the way you deduced what was going on, but who really knows maybe the pandas and penguins are playing with the titles.
Title Tags should be slick yet short anyway. Excellent Case Study!
+1
Nice analysis on Long Title Tags, never seen before thanks for sharing with us, enjoyed
I have always tried to make my title tags no longer than 68 characters. I have never had a truncation problem with Google. The bonus of this strategy is that I force myself to "trim the fat." The result is tight, highly relevant titles.
Very nice observation Ruth.
Having a short title definitely make sense coz nobody sees them anyways(even if you have one tab on your browser you only see 40 to 70 characters). But I think your finding is not accurate all the time. Take a look at here https://goo.gl/VRjTV A lot of long titles are there and they look just look fine.
There are different patterns and it's very hard to generalize them. Looking at this first result https://goo.gl/2R2TJ I thought Google is not considering the title at all. It only shows the domain name. I was suspicious about the title length (78 characters) however when I look at the first result here https://goo.gl/Sgfa title is there and it's 95 characters. So I assume it doesn't always about the length.
I've also seen many times when Google will take a site's title tag and completely change it based on the keyword you searched. I have a client who when you search for her name you get her website first in the search results with the title from her home page but if you search for her name and slogan Google shows her website first in the search results but changes her title to be her name and slogan. Pretty wild! I'm betting that may also help with getting more clicks through to her site.
What I love the most about this is that Google's algorithms should be able to decipher an appropriate TITLE if the one provided is too long and yet that doesn't seem to be the case. Google really doesn't "know best" yet, so people have to take control of their own SERP listings.
I'm quite intrigued by the pixel length issue, which will need looking at a bit more I think.
hii,
I have been involved in search engine optimization for a littile over a year and half now, i have a two website a I really enjoy that. I am sure that I will get more benefit from thi forum.
thanks and have a nice day..........
These are two very different questions and this discussion is muddling the two. If Google displays a tiltle that is different from mine because a searcher uses a keyword different than what I optimized for - that's mostly OK with me. I'm sure it won't rank a page differently because of a title it selects.
But what is the effect of longer titles on SERPs? Not keyword-loaded spammy titles but ones that are long because they are based on your site title creation guidelines (such as Page Name | Sub Section Name | Section Name | Brand) or derived from article title?
I can't imagine Google ignoring characters as ranking factors based on a pixel width, but certainly giving priority to keywords appearing earlier in the title. What's the research on title length for ranking COMPLETELY apart from title display issues.
I had a question pertaining to titles tags. When I check my Google Webmaster tools, each of my post shows a duplicate title tag even thought they are not duplicates. The only difference is it shows my post url, then the same url with /?rel=author added to the end of it. Like I said, they both are the same post.
Should this be of any concern to me, or should I just ignore it?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steve,
It sounds like you need to make sure you have the rel=canonical tag on your blog post pages to keep parameters from being indexed as separate URLs. This sounds like a great question for our Q&A section, where you can get advice from Moz employees as well as our awesome community!
Thanks, I will post my question there.
Steve
There is nothing big in this. It's so simple, If you are having more Anchor text with some other phrase then Google will show that title for that particular URL.
Solution is simple: Make links having anchor text which you want as your title.
That's it and it has been experimented for my client and I can not share those links here.
But I am confident about this, instead of wasting time here and there start working, i.e if your website title has been changed by Google then make backlinks with that title and update content according to that.
Some points:
1. If you are having good number of backlinks containing any words for some URL and some one is searching with that keyword then Google will show that title for that particular URL instead of actual.
2. sometime if you are having other phrase also as anchor text for same URL and some one is searching for that second phrase then Google may show this second Title for same URL or both anchor text.
3. You should also follow Char limit, that phrase in content, and other guidelines discussed here for better result.
4. If you do not have links, or even content related to title then Google will chose from page content.
5.But for one more client I do not have any thing related to title in content anywhere like title tag, desc, page content but then also title is coming for which I have worked (created backlinks) not the one which I have given or from content.
Good Luck.
In my blog there are 12 post.All of my post title are almost similar.Ex 1st post title "free recharge mobile in India" 2nd post title "free recharge mobile in Sri lanka".All post title differ in last two words only.Blog title is also similar like "How to free recharge mobile".Is this not a good seo practice?.should I change my blog post titles.
Nothing wrong in this, they should not be totally same.
Hi Ruth,
This is very interesting since I also use long title tags. Well, this is an observation a year ago and there are a lot of changes happened today especially that Hummingbird was introduced. There are also speculations that long tail keywords are great for SEO. Could it be that long title tags would produce greater results today?
There are different ways of being "great for SEO." It's important to note that having a long title tag probably won't impact your rankings either way - instead, it may impact your click-through rates from SERPs since Google may change or shorten the title tag to something your users find less appealing. While targeting long-tail keywords is certainly a valid SEO strategy, there are few keywords that are SO long that they would create a super-long title tag and still have enough value to be worth targeting. If you're seeing the results you want to see, that's great - I would just recommend keeping an eye on your title tags to see if they're being shortened, and if so, test longer title tags to see if you can raise click-through on those results.
I updated my WordPress in 3.9 and after that using a Yoast SEO Plugin There i see a warning in "SEO Title" That "Title display in Google is limited to a fixed width, yours is too long" but mine was 42 Characters i still don't get why this message is on all my posts [link removed]
hello Guys, you can simply generate the meta tite here https://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html . The best tool i got.
hi people i am not getting what i want , i went throw Google add words toll and found best keywords for my industry. Now the Thing is that I want keyword specific name I bought dellcomputersupport.net ( searches 1900 ) after that I Found dell support which has ( 165000 ) searches. now My CONCERN is I want to GO FOR domain like-dellsupportdelllaptopsdellcomputersdelltechsupport.com / THESE ARE THE HOT KEYWORDS .......SO. NOW CAN I GO FOR THIS DOMAIN OR NOT AND WHY ....I NEED ASSISTANCE * THANK YOU
Well...Google considers upto 66 characters in Title tag and in case you go for more characters, Google will take you down between 50 to 60 depending on last words length. So, don't take a risk of increasing a single character. This is so far, I have noticed.
What i have observed in this regard mostly is that when you search the domain name of the website (non www version) you find that as title in the SERP but when you search proper keyword for that page or website that was optimized then you find the original title that website has.
As far as long titles are concerned, Google is giving high ranking to those websites who have short titles tags than longers. As Google introduced the new term keyword suffing in Penguin update that means loading title, meta description and meta keywords with keywords just to manipulate the search engine rankings and it is also confusing the user.
Google Is Google No buddy understand it ...Also i challenged SEOMOZ expert have no knowledge about Google algo they only confuse people .. this is my website (www.seocompany-india.com)and you can see it's TITLE TAG is totally different with search result copy past this link ( https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=seo+agency+uk&oq=seo+agency+uk&gs_l=serp.3..0j0i5i30j0i8i30l2j0i22l4.3713.3870.0.4139.2.2.0.0.0.0.189.232.1j1.2.0...0.0...1c.PDM1hAePC9E ) you can see SEO Agency UK - SEO India - SEO Company India - SEO Services this title come in search result but on website page title is different.
or type "seo agency uk" in google.com you can find my website and short out my Title tag problem why google showing different title in search result that is not present in hosting server or page or any where ...but it showing it own title in search result ???? Expert's ..waiting for your solution ????
This is fairly common, actually. For a couple of years Google has been changing the title in the SERPs based on the query and if they think the title tag is spammy.
How does a brand name effect this? For example, if I have a title tag that "fits" without the brand, but when I add my brand to the title tag it's more than 70 characters...any thoughts? Would you suggest just leaving the brand off of the title page in that instance?
I know that in the past Google has done a pretty good job of just removing a brand name when it's at the end of a too-long title, especially if that naming convention is site-wide. I think you could at least try it, and just keep an eye on the pages where the brand name makes the title tag too long - if you start seeing wonky titles displaying in the SERPs, then remove it.
"It looks like having a short, search-friendly title tag has increased in importance - without it, Google could replace your title with just about anything"
We better pay attention to Google Webmaster Tools comments regarding title and Meta tag description
Recently Google Just Synchronize Title tags for internal page. I have just face the same problem for some of my pages. I have just change the title tags for my internal page and Google also cached my page after some time but still I have getting my old title tags in SERP., Also for one page I got the 1st rank on Google but when I search 2nd keywords which i have set in Same Page Title Tags not visible even in top 100 result. I have even back links also for same keyword.
Please advice me how I can remove Title Synchronization Problem in Google Search Result?
RuthBurr! You just did it.
A way you just examined the situation of customize title tag is an incredible and now we are complete clear with customization of title tag within search result of Google. Well now, a very next step to customize our title tag for the blog posts and i m really curiosity to know exact length of title tag which will help us to get revamp our search result for blog posts.
Now, I believe that may be next post from your end should be "Google Meta Signals on Organic Search Results"
Waiting for the same
Thanks
Awesome post regarding fixing title tags thanks RuthBurr. I am also facing same problem for so many websites. If title tags carry wide pixel length then Google just cut down the title tags and customize it.
I am very curious to know about exact pixel length for title tags from MOZ experts.
Thanks
RuthBurr was correct, I have got same experience like SEOmofo. When we add more than 69 or 70 characters, Google truncating the title from 45 or 50. But If we add some thing around 60 to 65 characters at Title tag, it displays same as we entered. Some time I have experience, Sometimes Google display only keywords what we used to search and or similar kind of word out of the title. So this is some thing confusing. But honestly Still I didn't saw any search results which, file name copied to title tag. :)
One more change to keep in mind when doing on page SEO. Good information to consider.
Without wanting to pat myself on the back too much, I actually pointed out the more flexible character limit right here last year. But 107 characters? Oof, now that's one long title snippet!
More to the point of this post, I suppose that's the downside to having search engine friendly URLs - if the search engines can make sense of them, they can actually use them for something. It's probably for the better though if it gets people to use more concise titles rather than these keyword-heavy behemoths you encounter way too often. And I'd assume that in time, the replacement titles will stop looking so obviously machine-generated -- note to Google: removing the URL-hyphens would be a start! -- in favour of more natural titles.
What I'd be interested to find out is if this in any way affects the keyword value in longer titles. If it's not displayed in the snippet does it also get discounted for ranking? Or vice versa, would keywords used in the URL but not in the title that get used in the snippet suddenly become more relevant for ranking? Or is snippet display and keyword retrieval handled completely separately?
Since part of what Google is trying to do with the snippet is demonstrate relevance to the query, I'd imagine you have an increased likelihood of an alternate title and snippet displaying if the query is in the page text but not the title tag. I agree that over time the replacement titles will probably get better.
Google has been making changes to the title tags for quite a long time. I wrote a post on this in september of last year. At the bottom of this post there is a video by Matt Cutts in which he has explained how Google handles really long title tags. Here is what Matt Said:
"if you use a really really long title, Google may still use it in its scoring but when they are ready to show it to the user they may find a better title“. He has also confirmed that the title itself can change like meta description."
Wow, i didn't even think of that. It's good to know that Google still uses the long titles as a major ranking factor, even if it isn't displaying them.
Hi Ruth,
Great Post on Long Title Tags,
For more visit Title Tag - https://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
Good article RuthBurr!
IMHO, Page title must be unique, descriptive and appeal to user.
Here is a great post on Title tags from Google Webmaster Blog:
Better page titles in search results
The best bet is 45-65 characters. Depends on the pixel of the character, it will reach to 69 at the max....
Anyway adding symbols like !@#$%^&*-| - not gonna consider any way in title. Therefore, it’s time to avoid...
Even there are few words that Google not at all giving importance and hence neglecting... I can’t tell you those words exactly now... however, I will surely come back with those words in future :)
I personally prefer 65 to 69 char for title. Create as much effective title as you can in only 65 char. This "A" and "W" char space concept is new for me. I'll study on this. But my concern is also about meta description. Though description is proper, then also Google take inner content. Can anybody help me in this case??
Hi ruth
It seems Google is destined to put our Titles on a Diet of some sort, of which im neither impressed nor entertained. As one of the above posters we also have a lot of posts now which we must manually go through, to make sure this looks presentable enough for a user to be entertained enough by <70 Characters to click through. Seemingly it wants much much shorter post titles or at least prefers them.
One word comes to mind, "frustrating" but has anyone done more definitive testing on which is the preferred method around this, <60 ?
And also i would love please anyone to please present something that could speed things up for us also mentioned by another of the posters ^.
60 is what Bing suggests, so why not optimize for both? I think one new recurring task that's going to come out of this development is checking on what text is displaying in the SERPs, and making sure it's a good user experience.
Quick catch Ruth!
Don't envy you the job of wading through all the posts on SEOmoz to make those changes.
Really, I think this is merely an extension of the track that Google started on with its list of "Ten Recent Algorithm Changes" back in November last year when it began by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors.
Not to be the messenger of doom, but I've had the feeling that Titles moved up on Google's "Hit List" ever since the appearance of these little tidbits in that November blog post, which largely went unnoticed:
"Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu."
"Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content."
Given their history of targeting the elements that people try to manipulate most, and the fact that long titles can be the result of manipulation, I would not be surprised if another small apocalypse is on the horizon.
So the question is, what happens if Google should suddenly disregardTitle elements completely in the SERPs (think keyword meta tag etc)? If this were to happen, is the actual text on your page good enough to produce titles that will still earn you clickthrough?
Sha
errr...that was a generic "you", not aimed at you personally Ruth :)
Ahh that's cool now i have one question... Please check the following link and tell me the reason why Google done this?
Image Link
I am not sure and my hypotheses can be completely wrong but here are my views:
Ø Your Actual titles are long and offering keywords instead of the information about the post, whereas Google’s created title tags are more relevant to the page.
Ø I think the 2nd part of your title is picked up from the content because you are talking too much about Facebook Application Development in the page and footer bar
This is what I think but I would love to hear the opinion of others on this!
Hey Moosa thanks for your reply but i have more pages with same footer they show actual titles in SERP but some of them are not showing the same.
I think Moosa is on the right track - Google is mix-and-matching the first keyword in your title with a commonly used keyword on your site and in your inbound anchor text. I wouldn't be surprised if the anchor text were affecting this just as much as your on-site keyword usage.
YEah Moosa were right Google checking my content but still i like to say that all pages and their content are differ and there is no usage of that specific keyword or phrase. and also no bad affect from this but still i like to know why Google doing this with some of the pages.
Noman as I said there can be verity of possibilities and assumptions as you drill down in to it…
May be your most anchored term within the website is ‘Facebook Application Development’… may be much websites are linking to you from this keyword and several other possibilities… I think in order to know what exactly is the case, you might have to play with different things in the website.
That is what I could guess as well, the most anchored title. I have seen some results where only 2 word title is displayed of merely 11-12 chars.
Hi Syed,Maybe Google is smarter now and he can 'understand' that when we use things like - | : we are spamming the title with keywords. A normal and a natural title shouldn't have these characters
Cornel
SO, what do you think is that spamming? in Actual title?
Well I can't say is 100% spammy, but is not 100% natural.How many times we've written an article title with these characters ... I haven't seen many.
Cornel
I manage a website that has HUNDREDS of blog posts that are fed in with XML to WordPress. So am I going to have to go back through every individual post and fill in the "SEO title" section now? I will have to automate that one somehow...
Yikes! What I ended up doing was a site: search for our blog and then just going in and changing the posts whose titles were truncated - still pretty tedious but not too bad, since many of our posts had short enough titles already.
If you come up with a way to automate that process I'd love to hear about it!
I wouldn't panic yet. To me the dashed results are a bug, so expect more changes.
Google is trying to display the title they think most represents the content (they look better when people find what they want), so I think the rule is that you should suggest to them (via the title tag) what that is.
however, till "yesterday", Google wasn't really considering the number of characters... but the number of words!
BTW Ruth is that possible before SEOmofo no one think about pixels because in my 3 year experience i saw many of time long title tags shown in SERP is that any update or revealed a hidden fact :S
In my experience "how much title tag to show" is something Google's been experimenting with for a while.
Ahh thats cool, thanks Ruth for your back to back answers..
I have heard both 70 and 68 as the character limit over the last few years, however it seems like this may have changed to a more 'pixel' related measurement, which is a right pain. I think 'shorter & sweeter' title tags are the way forward in the future perhaps? Anyway off to Google to check out some of our long blog titles :-)
Speaking of title tags, I hate to see sites that are unaffected by panda and penguin even their title tag is pure keywords like KEYWORD 1 | KEYWORD 2 | KEYWORD 3
I see there are various websites ranking high and they are using very long titles. Is there going to be any penalty for long titles?
It seems to me like Google makes a decision of what they think is "best practice" for users and then they modify the SERPs to show the decision and finally begin penalizing or not promoting results that don't fit into that "best practice" for user experience. Maybe ;)
I think it's less likely that Google will actively penalize for something like title tags, and more likely that they will just encourage the behavior they want to see by rewarding it.
Do you think this only matters for long titles?
A website I manage shows high in the results for a keyword that it is only linked internally and not even in the title but when I Google the keyword in question the title of the site shows "Keyword - Sitename" instead of "Real Title Here - Sitename"
Ruth, this is very useful info for the time being but I anticipate that over time Google will stop using title tags for most indexing purposes and will supplant with schema properties. This will allow them to more accurately index content relevant to searches based on more granular content elements on each page. The grand narrative written by the title tag will be replaced with the situated stories of specific products, people, places and organizations. There will be less need to stuff title tags with as many characters.
Great post Ruth, nice bit of sleuthing! I disagree with the comments that suggest there was nothing new here - I hadn't considered pixel width previously, so thank you for giving me something else to think about : )
This is the sort of thing I tend to forget to check back on, as I'm usually focused on content creation and link-building, so a post that prompts me to revisit on-site elements a bit more frequently is always welcome.
Keep it simple and natural...
goodness this is complicated! i dont want any of those dashed titles they look horrid.
Thanks Ruth. I think Google is always working to improve itself so that the result is more accurate and relevant. I no longer set up title tags, meta tags for blog posts anymore because Google can get them just right. Also, for my website, I use both long title tags and SEO friendly URLs. Therefore, no matter what Google chooses to display, they are both looking good. For title tags, of course, we should make sure the visible part of the tag in SERP (first 70 characters or whatever the number is) is the most important content we want to show our customers. See my examples here: all of them have long title tags...
https://www.chauvellaw.com/our-serviceshttps://www.chauvellaw.com/business-and-real-estate-transactions
Nice observation there Ruth. I think that Google is trying to save up adword space. Sometimes, wider letters take up more space and the title is truncated to less than 70 chars. The interesting bit would be to observe what part of the page does Google parse for the alternate title. The URL may not be optimized in some cases. What does Google come up with in that scenario. Worth watching out this behavior. Thanks for the headsup on this one!
Hi,
I can suggest for title,meta description and keywords etc we can use google seo site tool which is very much useful for seo
Seemingly a little thing but maintaining a "best practice" quality site has its benefits in the long-run. Some of us have to do a lot more work to fit into these changes simply because we got lazy. It'll be interesting to see the long term effect on CTR and Rankings because of them spending time on this specific element of a page.
Never seen this before... thanks for the tip.
This practice is not always linked to the length of the Title.
https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles
In many instances Google is replacing Titles with the URL when the URL delivers more relevance based on the user query.
I also have a suspicion that Feedburner has something to do with this but haven't been able to confirm this yet.
Was just coming to comment the same thing.
@Ruth - maybe update the post with AJ's note above?
Thanks for the suggestion! I updated with a link to AJ's post.
Ruth, great investigating. Title lengths came up in a discussion the other day and this is exactly what we need to hear.
I think this is being done to account for mobile/tablet devices. Since that is where more people will be searching and engaging, Google is trying to stay ahead of the curve by having shorter titles that will still make sense when viewed on those devices.
I prefer a Title not longer than 66 character and META Description upto 156 characters.