18 replies to this topic

[bobmeetin]

Pretty sure it never was.

 

It seems to become a moot point. I ran tests with both Google and Yahoo about 5 years ago. They confirmed that the max title indexed was 95 characters. So now it is at least 140; okay fine so what next and why.

 

I am currently engaged with a couple eCommerce and very local MaPa shops.  With the MaPa shops I will make use of the first 70 viewable characters with key phrases, then add the location, city and state at the end, infringing into the additional space if necessary. IMHO - the key phrases are more important to the viewer than seeing the locale.

 

With eCommerce site(s) I rewrote the code that creates the titles to include "Part name + Price + Business Name".  If the business name gets cutoff, okay. If the price gets axed, we live with that.

 

There is a lot of nebulous information on the internet (if I found it on the internet it must be true, yes?) regarding best practices for title tag length.  Standards - which standard should we employ today?

[Michael Martinez]

I don't bother to count characters or words in page titles.  Looking at my most active blog it's hard for me to find a title longer than 70 characters.  All these posts can be found for their titles.

 

I think people are confusing "INDEXING" with "DISPLAYING" in some cases.  Just because you cannot see the entire page title in the SERP does not in any way mean that Google did not index the portion that was truncated in the SERP.  It just means they are only showing so much.

 

There are people who claim that their studies/analyses show that they get better conversions when the entire title is displayed in the SERPs but I have never seen any publicly shared data (actually, I don't believe anyone has shown me any before/after conversion data in private that would support this).

So while I cannot say whether these studies are reliable, I can say that there is a lot of loose terminology sliding around the deck of this ship.  People should be careful about trusting what they read concerning title length.  The search engines are getting better and better at dealing with the titles we create.

 

The more natural a title is (the less thought about SEO that you put into it) the more likely it will do okay.  The more you try to "optimize" a page the more likely you'll hit some algorithmic process or filter.  There is so much "optimization" going on right now that the search engines have been directly reacting to it with algorithmic changes over the past couple of years.

 

This is another fine example of how the "Less is More" principle works better than all the SEO advice on the Web.

Edited by Michael Martinez, 01 April 2013 - 01:48 PM.

[chrishirst]

While off topic, a 302 never really seemed to have meant "temporary" at least not to search engines.

 

and "Permanent" is only "permanent until removed".

Edited by chrishirst, 02 April 2013 - 11:59 AM.

[chrishirst]

okay fine so what next and why

 

Well, absolutely nothing different at all.

 

...

 

 

 

 

That is assuming you create titles for marketing or branding rather than some dubious "ranking" 'value'.