Does having several long title tags hurt you?
-
Our title tags are dynamically generated, and some have over 140 characters.
Does having a large quantity of URLS with an excessive number of characters hurt you in any way?
-
The extra 70 characters can help - Google DOES index them: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday
If you can, make sure the first 70 characters are most relevant to the page content, and readable for the user - if they don't like what they see or it doesn't make sense without the other 70 characters they're unlikely to click through.
You don't mention whether your brand name is included in the tag; unless you're really well known in your niche it usually makes sense to have the brand at the end of the title tag (if at all). I'm an SEO for a couple of news websites where the titles are often well over 70 characters (with the brand names at the end). It doesn't seem to cause any serious problems and we have had high traffic from SERPs with longer titled articles. I advise the editors to put the main keywords near the beginning of the title if possible, with readability (for the human!) being the most important thing.
-
It won't create a penalty per se, however search engines will be truncating your title tags with a '...', meaning you don't have control of how your title tags look. You're better off trimming them down to something shorter and meaningful, knowing that the appearance of your meta data on SERPs affects your CTR, which affects ranking. Plus, the extra 70 chars aren't helping you, because Google isn't indexing them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
Description tag in code is different from what is shown in SERPS...
Hi there: We have a client whose website we built in WP, using Yoast Pro as our SEO plugin. I was reading some reports (actually coming out of SEMrush but we use Moz as well) and I am getting really varying results in the description are of the SERPS. Even though I'm seeing the copy we wrote in Yoast in the description tag code, the SERP is showing an excerpt from the copywriting on the site. What's even weirder is that SEMrush is pulling an entirely DIFFERENT description. I'm obviously missing out on the finer points of description tags, as Google clearly does not always choose to feature what is actually written in the description tag itself. Can someone explain to me what might be going on here? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey1 -
Title & Keywords
Hi Quick question on arrangement of keywords in titles. I know the order isn't so important anymore, but would there be a real issue if I want to rank for 'Henry Xtra' but my title reads 'Numatic Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' Rather than 'Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' ?? Will it really make much difference? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Pagination do you still need unique titles?
Hi Guys, For pagination, if you have implemented the rel Prev/Next tags correctly, is it fine to have duplicate titles in the series example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Some people mention that you should make them unique and add the page number example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Keen to hear what you guys thing? Personally, i think its fine to have duplicate title tags when you have properly implemented rel Prev/Next tags as Googel will see the series as one. Cheers.0 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Can I put a video transcript into a title tag?
I use wistia.com to embed videos onto my company website. Because of the way I have my page setup, I have to embed my video using the iframe embed option. Since I'm using this option, my video transcript isn't going to be SEO friendly. Can I manually insert a title tag within the video iFrame code with the entire transcript? Would that be a good workaround so that I can have the transcript help my page optimization? Thanks! Andrea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Why does Google show Titles different than the coded titles?
Hi, I've noticed that on many pages Google shows on the SERPS titles that he chose for me and not necessarily the ones coded in the Title tag (usually small difference like adding suffix etc.). Why is that? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0