Title elements too long - good for SEO?
-
As I was reviewing a client's web pages I noticed that most of the pages have titles that exceed the 70 characters limit.
By looking in more details it seems that Google uses all keywords from this long titles. I wanted to reduce the titles under 70 characters but realised that I may cut some important keywords. By reducing to 70 characters, do you think I can damage the performance?.
-
Thank you Peter.
I appreciate your useful feedback.
-
There is some evidence that keywords beyond 65-70 are read by search engines, but practically speaking, Alan is absolutely right. Every keyword you add dilutes the power of other keywords, and trying to cram in extra keywords is almost never worth the trouble.
The only exception I'd make is if you have auto-generated titles - let's say product names, and those product names are by themselves over 65 characters on rare occasion (1 in 100 products). In that case, I wouldn't worry about it - you could leave a few of those alone without harm.
More often, though, people try to cram in "Product | Category | Sub-category | Brand" and it spins out of control. Shorter titles, focused on the unique keywords for that page, are going to be more effective in 95%+ of cases.
-
Alan is right. Your question reminded me of this relevant WBF. Enjoy! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday
-
no, shorten them to 65, to fit all search engines
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-title-is-too-longHaving many keywords means your are diluting them,
the title Keyword gives all its credit to one keyword, but Keyword1 Keyword2 only gives half the credit to each.
Your parents can leave you all their money, but if you have a brother you will only get half.
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
-
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
Page speed in relation to SEO
I cannot seem to find any information about this, so I thought I would try to get a few people's opinion. How do you think pagespeed is measured in terms of Google using it as a ranking factor? Do you think they use their internal Pagespeed app? Something during the crawl? Your GA site speed?
Technical SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
Is dash problem for seo?
My web site http://www.green-lotus-trekking.com is this problem for google search engine optimization? Some little percentage problem or totally I am in Confusion?
Technical SEO | | agsln0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi I just got back from first crawl report and there were plenty of errors. I know this has been asked before but I am newbie here so bear with me. I captured the video. Any ideas on how to address the issue? ktXKDxRttK
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Issue Duplicate Page Title
I'm having some really strange issues with duplicate page titles and I can't seem to figure out what's going on. I just got a new crawl from SEOMOZ and it's showing some duplicate page titles. http://www.example.com/blog/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/2/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/3/ Repeat .............. I have no idea what's going on, how these were duplicated, or how to correct it. Does anyone have a chance to take a look and see if you can figure out what's happening and what I need to do to correct the errors? I'm using Wordpress and all in one SEO plugin. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Cloud Hostings & SEO Effects
Is there any negative to cloud hosting? I believe they share the same IP addresses but is it true you can still get banned if someone else on a shared IP or server does some spam?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0
