Titles being too long
-
I am in process of trying to help a client (who I also am an associate for) and they have over 600 pages (which are images) that have the same info in their tag, missing description, and you are talking 1500-2k pixels in their title.
I called the host and the owner of the host said "If you were a real seo you would know that the title length doesn't matter." .... help me out here.
-
From a product perspective, we tend to need to set guidelines that can be quantified, but I'm afraid the whole truth is never quite that black-and-white. All else being equal, I think keeping your titles to a reasonable length is beneficial. Long titles don't automatically harm you (there's no Capital-P penalty for it), but they tend to create a few problems:
(1) Often, long, CMS-generated titles front-load repetitive words (like the site name or category/sub-category), which devalues the unique/important words in Google's eyes and is more likely to make it look like duplicate content.
(2) Long titles tend to devalue important words for search visitors as well, which can harm click-through rates. I'm a firm believer that CTR has indirect impact on ranking over time. Even if it had no SEO significance, it's generally bad for engagement and for your site.
That said, it depends a lot on what you're dealing with. If a title of a page is, say, a title of a blog post, and it's just a long title, that's probably fine. If you have 5,000 product pages that all start with "Bob's Discount Propane Warehouse | Propane and Propane Accessories | ...", then that's going to be detrimental to your usability and SEO.
You mentioned images in your reply to Christy -- could you give a couple of examples of the types of pages and titles you're talking about? In general, image-only pages with no additional content (especially if they have near-duplicate titles) are going to be low-value from a search perspective.
-
How he acted kinda made me second guess what I have known all of this time.
SO... With over 600 pages of images where you can not put additional content/wording on each of those pages and each of those pages have long titles, would you guys recommend removing those images from becoming their own pages (since you can't add additional content) and just put them together in different slideshows or tables?
And is it still true that long titles (over 35 or 570 pixels) are not advisable?
-
Hi SeobyKP, that sounds really frustrating! Ugh, so sorry you are dealing with that. Now, what exactly can we help you with? That is, what specific question would you like us to address in this thread?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Christy
-
HA! doesnt matter huh...
download SEO Quake as a chrome extension. Its great stuff. It will grade every page in detail, showing you how long titles and descriptions should be, as well as other metrics. big fan.
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
-
Is it black hat to include your city name in a blog title to hopefully help local search resultts
I frequently blog and want to increase my ranking in local search in my area-Boston-blogging about Plastic Surgery. If I write a post about tummy tuck will I be penalized by Google search if I use a title like
Content Development | | wianno168
Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss Boston or Boston Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss0 -
Best way to publish FAQs to capture long tail traffic?
If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist? Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
FAQ page to target "long tail keywords".
I'm wondering if there is any benefit to creating a FAQ section on a website for the purpose of ranking for long tail keywords. If so, are there best practices in the way that the page is structured? Also, would doing this just help me rank the FAQ page for these terms or would it also help more critical pages on my website, such as homepage, contact, about, etc... which do not contain these keywords.
Content Development | | pharcydeabc0 -
RSS feeds with dup content and titles
Hi, For my Buddypress site I use a tool to create sites with RSS feeds. Each site is for a different feed, but the number of dup tiles and content is running in the thousands. I've been trying to reduce the dups, but have begun to think there is more trouble from such content than benefit. Should I dump the content or ignore the errors flagged by SEOMOZ? Any ideas if thes RSS feed dups are hurting my BuddyPress site? Any suggestions in general about how to eliminate such dupe for a Buddypress Site, eg. the activity log. Larry
Content Development | | tishimself0 -
Title case or lower can URL folders
Is it best to have lower case URLs e.g mydomain.com/hotels-in-london/ or title case like mydomain.com/Hotels-In-London/ I noticed in the seomoz tools that it would report the above two URLs as duplicate if the site had two links using pointing to each URL
Content Development | | NeilTompkins0 -
Leap of Faith - Damm the consequences - Title Tag Change
the crazy things we do mid week. But after reading Cyrus' post on beating Panda I went back to my website design site http://www.grangewebdesign.com which I had set up a plugin which had all my posts setup as Website Design - %%title%% So basically every Title tag had Website Design in front of it. REadingthis post now it suggests that this is bad practice so I just changed it to %%title%% which now of course means that I should perhaps look more closely at the titees I have been using. Was embedding the Website Design in front of the post overkill? thoughts appreciated...
Content Development | | kdaly1000 -
Meta Title and Description Placement in Wordpress
I noticed in wordpress code that the <title>and <description> are not at the top of the code and rather located a ways down the code and not displayed how previous sites used to be.</p> <p>Does this still matter for SEO.</p> <p>I thought it should have been,</p> <div id="syn_row5" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">title</span>></span><span class="HTML_TAG"></<span class="HTML_ELM">title</span>></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_ROW"> <div id="syn_row6" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">meta</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">name</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">"Description"</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">content</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">""</span> /></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"> <div id="syn_row6" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">meta</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">name</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">"Keywords"</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">content</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">""</span> /> (if still needed ?)</span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"> </span></span></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG">Is there a way to do this in Wordpress? Or does placment not matter anymore?</span></span></span></span></span></span></div> </span></span></div> </div></title>
Content Development | | hfranz0 -
Long versus short copy
Does the search engines have a preference for pages with long or short copy? (Assuming our short copy fulfill the basic keyword requirements) While a long copy, enable us to include more long tail keywords, i find that most people prefer to read a short copy. We currently try to keep each page short and give the reader an option to explorer further with links to more detailed pages.
Content Development | | petersen0