Limiting to 70 Characters or Less

[lbohen]

Some of our top search performing competitors do NOT limit their titles to 70 characters.

How important is the 70 characters or less guideline in getting excellent search positions?

Does having titles greater than 70 characters hurt our search engine positions?

[zigojacko]

To answer your question specifically, the 70 characters limit for page title recommendations is not important at all for "getting excellent search positions", it's a guideline because search engines won't pay much attention to anything after70 characters. It's not a ranking factor.

As Zeph points out, search results will only display the first 70 characters so anything longer than this won't be seen by your intended audience anyhow. Much more focus is giving for the beginning of page titles, and then it fades, the longer it gets - hence why it is recommended to structure your page titles in order of relevance and importance.

So page titles longer than 70 characters will not hurt search engine positions directly, but will prove more likely that their is wasted opportunity and contain stop words unnecessarily.

[ZephSnapp]

I agree with Neil but I also want to add a couple of points.

Think of it from a UX standpoint.  If you are looking at the SERPs when searching, and you see a headline that trails off with three dots like so...does that make you more or less likely to click on that result?  In my experience pages that have longer titles and descriptions generally have a lower click through rate.  This means that their high ranking is generally less effective (all other things being equal of course).

Also, you need to remember that the algo has many factors and each one may have its own level of emphasis.  So maybe these pages that rank better now have a better backlink profile.  Maybe they are creating fresh content periodically.  This type of activity can offset the fact that their page titles are too long.  Unless you are certain that the longer page title is the only reason that they are ranking above you, there is no need to copy that particular strategy...In fact, you should look at other factors like Page Authority and MozRank before you go writing long titles.  As my grandmother would say, "if your competitors jump off a bridge, would you do it too?"

Hopefully this helps, and let me know if there is anything else I can do.

[NeilTompkins]

I would if at all possible adhere to the guidelines as set by for example Google, that they recommend that all title tags are 70 characters or less.

Those sites currently ranking with a longer title tag might find in the future a slight search tweak in Google's algorithm would affect their ranking.