Aug 25, 2007
Just how many characters in the title does Google show? Is it 70 or 71?Google has been playing around with the number of characters that it shows in the title on search results. I have recently seen that it has been showing not the standard 71, but in fact 70 characters of the title of websites when it lists pages in its search results.
This has been a problem where I have been using exactly 71 characters in titles of web pages. All of a sudden, there has been a " ..." showing at the end, and words missed out. So I have been reducing the length of titles to the 70, or even 69 to cater for Google idiosyncrasy's.
The title of this post is 71 characters. So it will be interesting to see just how many characters it shows.
Meta description length
The same is actually true for the meta description. For a number of years, Google has been showing 156 characters, and then adding " ..." to the end. Now I notice that it is only showing 155 characters. So as a test, I have added a meta description to this page of 156 characters. Lets see how Google treats this page in the results.The following link will show up this page in Google results - lets see the " ..." showing
That is rather interesting! While 71 characters is obviously too many for the title, it is still showing the 156 characters of the meta description. So lets change it to 157.
16 Comments
Michael Brandon - Search Engine Optimisation - Sep 8, 2007
That is an easy one. This article is talking about the limit being only 70 rather than 71 characters now.
Your old title was:
"Ecommerce Web Design and Development, Tauranga, NZ - EZ Web Development"
=exactly 71 characters. So Google with its 70 character new limit cut it off at the last word being "web", and added the " ..."
"Ecommerce Web Design and Development, Tauranga, NZ - EZ Web ..." - Google missed out the entire word if that word spans the limit, being 70 characters.
Your new title has the same issue - 71 characters.
"EZ Web Development - Website Design and E-commerce Development Tauranga" - the word Tauranga will be cut off entirely, and replaced by " ..."
Dunken Francis - Aikido Auckland - Nov 1, 2007
So let me get this right - is the best way to structure a title for google to use ALL the allowed characters or just keep it within the allowed limit?
Michael Brandon - Nov 1, 2007
Best way is to know the rules, then do what ever is best for your business, having known the rules.
So if it works to have exactly 70 for your business... Or maybe you only need to use 65 of the total 70, or maybe people can guess what the next words are, and so you effectively get more than 70 because the " ..." after the word lets people guess the remainder, or be intrigued as to what is following.
I generally say "know the rules, then break them". Or decide to follow them.
This was very helpful for a beginner in SEO. I am just starting to look into all of this and it seems like it might take some time to hang of it.
Northville Real Estate Agent - MARK Z. - Jul 20, 2008
I like the part you talk about after the 70 characters in the title or after 156 in the meta description to get creative to make people guess what you are about to say next. That is a great idea and never thought about it like that. Thanks for the tip.
Vladimir Djikanovic - Jun 10, 2009
Sometimes, it's good idea not to put sentence in decription, but instead of that data formated something like this: "Project: description | Date: 4.4.2009. | Place: Belgrade, Serbia | Goal: coming up with good description for your web page..." and so on. This approach allows you to put more data in less place, and it's very clean and neat.
san diego real estate - Nov 5, 2009
This was very helpful for a beginner in SEO. That is an easy one to understand. Best way is to know the rules, then do what ever is best for your business, having known the rules.
That is a great idea and never thought about it like that. Thanks for the tip.
Ewan Kennedy - SEO Specialist - Mar 11, 2010
The company ranked number 1 in google.co.uk for [seo specialists] and [seo services] uses precisely 70 characters in its title. Worth pointing out these 70 characters are the number displayed. It's 74 before the amp; gets stripped out. I have always previously used 64 as a max limit but within that tried to balance various goals such as having the title short and punchy, alluring if in keeping with the style of the site and of course including the vital core keyword(s).
Ewan Kennedy - SEO Specialist - Mar 12, 2010
Good call.
I don't think Google have really got the hang of search - they're not on page 1 of google.co.uk for the keyword "search" (:-).
Miloà - Web dizajn - Apr 17, 2010
Google shows 70 characters in the title tag. But it is interesting that if it is title tag longer then 70 characters and main thematic keyword phrase of web page is after 70 characters, position of that web page on the google SERP-s is much lower. So google suggests us that theme of every web page has to be very focused and first parts of every piece of text is the most important part.
This kind of change can bother the web msters who were relying on 70 characters shown in the title. Now they have to change hundreds of titles in their articles.
Nowdays it's 70 characters http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022303.html
robert - Sep 4, 2007
I have an interesting situation..
If you google: ezwd.co.nz
You will see the first link is the home page of my business website .. the title tag is exactly 71 characters and it as you can see, but the title is cut off but quite a lot. The title length of the home page before the ... at the end it only 63 characters, how can this be?