12 replies to this topic

[kevs]

In Google, what think cut off is for titles? After how many words do you think Google is not paying attention anymore. thanks!

[redsonia!]

I think most people recommend keeping the title between 10-12 words.

[jon-d]

I think most people recommend keeping the title between 10-12 words.

I think thats a load of tosh...

CODE

<title>Deoxyribonucleic Acid Information, Chromosomes and Eukaryotic Organisms studies. Scientific Studies Online</title>

11 words- 106 characters. 40 characters over Googles truncation value.

CODE

<title>DNA Info, Chromosome & Organism Study Online. Scientific Studies UK</title>

10 words 67 characters.

I think the op was saying- Do the keywords in a title tag that go beyond search engines truncation hold as much value as those that don't?

[kevs]

I not really thinking about the truncation, becuase, for all we know, those words that are not visible have huge impact on ranking. But I suppose we are all guessing right? Google does not let anyone know?
Does 16th word get good ranking like the 10 word? this is what I'm asking.

[Randy]

There's a slightly older thread on this very subject. Not really old, just 2 or 3 months ago.

I believe Bob/Qwerty had done some studying/testing on the subject in the past and had some info, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was exactly. My failing memory says it was more about the number of words than character count, but remember this vague recollection is popping up from my failing memory. Hopefully Bob or whoever had the data will pop by, see this one and chime in.

Or you might try doing a forum search using the forum's search app to see if you can find it. To do that choose search above, then more More Search Options then scroll down past the Google one and use the forum one. Make sure to search all of the forum because goodness only knows what section it might be in. But if you input a search query something along the lines of "title length" and peg it to Qwerty's username, it should turn up something. Probably several somethings consider the subject has been discussed multiple times.

[mal4mac]

Didn't find Qwerty's post, Randy...

Anyway, it's three months old, Google may have changed things since then.

Personally I think the answer is anything from one word up to the limit of what can be seen by the user. That is what Google should be paying *serious* attention to, anything beyond that isn't worth thinking about because users never see it. Google may, as Randy's experiments indicate, count such words. But, surely, it can only be a matter of time before Google come down hard on overly-long titles.

Within those limits - experiment! For instance, because "Google loves Wikipedia" I tried a title that followed the Wikipedia pattern, and then I changed it to a two word title to see if "higher density beats Wikipedia". The page ended up one place higher with "high density". Of course Google might be giving me Brownie points for frequent editing! Or something else entirely. So you need to keep your hypotheses very ..er.. hypothetical.

[Jill]

I've not tested it (not sure why not) but my guess is there may not be a limit for what they index. The value they give each word, however, might be different depending on where it falls in the tag.

But I'm totally speculating.

[kevs]

I''m going with what Jill said.

Or I'm hoping for that. My homepage has twenty words...

[Ron Carnell]

It's been a number of years since I ran tests, but Jill is (or at least once was) essentially right. There is no limit.

I put up pages with exceptionally long title tags (up to 2k at one point), composed of nonsense words, and Google had no problem finding the pages based only on a nonsense word at the far end of the title. If there's a limit, I never found it.

I could not, however, determine anything reliable about title keyword proximity.

I set up competing pages using nonsense words, one with the keyword near the beginning of the title and another with the keyword way at the end, and the SERPs I got were inconclusive. Sometimes one would rank first, sometimes the other.

It would, of course, be a childishly simple test to run again. I haven't done so because, from a realistic perspective, I think long titles are useless. They certainly don't help the human visitor, who will probably only see them when they try to edit that long title to make it fit in their bookmarks, and I can't see them helping in the search engines either. Not unless you really think a page is going to rank well for twenty or thirty keywords?

[qwerty]

My tests were quite unscientific and took place almost five years ago, but involved these three pages.

There's a nonsense word associated with the three pages, and it's in the title of the 1st and 3rd pages, as the 11th and 10th word respectively. The second page only has it in the body. On Google and Bing, the page with the word appearing earlier in the title ranks higher. On Yahoo, it's the other way around.

Make of that what you will. As I said, it's utterly unscientific (because I'm utterly unscientific).

[mal4mac]

I''m going with what Jill said.

Or I'm hoping for that. My homepage has twenty words...

It seems a bit long to me. I just shortened a title from ten words to two and it went up one place in the SERPs for the keyword I was shooting for. It might do the opposite next week of course...

If you don't want to do daily experiements, why not shoot for a happy medium?

A happy medium is not a twenty word title, half of which no human can see...

[1dmf]

I do beleive in someway you dilute your ranking for keywords the more you put in your title.

that's what I've noticed anyway, ok on page KWD Density is a long gone SEO technique, but is there some form of it going on in the title tag?

[adibranch]

findings from me are...
gives more prominence to words appearing earlier in the title.
Dilution does occur and have an impact.