Regarding Google Title 'Width' and changing Meta Titles w/o Penalty?

[lawfirm]

A vast majority of pages on my site are now too wide (the character count was fine prior to the March update).

I want to go through and update them so they display properly and are not too wide.However, I am concerned, as my understanding was that changing Meta Titles is dangerous and can have a negative effect on your rankings and can cause real issues. Is this an opportunity to change my Titles all-together without any kind of penalty? Or can I only trim the end part?

In summary:

1. Can I edit all of my Meta Titles without affecting my rankings?

2. If no, how do I edit them properly to fit within the proper width and not cause any issues?

3. If yes, I can go through and change all my Meta Titles to whatever extent and optimize them to reflect latest best practices? There are changes I wanted to make to all my meta titles but I've been afraid to... due to fear of rankings drops etc

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated

[Dr-Pete]

There's no one-sized-fits-all answer to this, I'm afraid. Any large-scale change to a site carries risk, and could even look like over-optimization. Even if it's a great, high-quality change, Google may re-evaluate the site, and you could easily see short-term ranking fluctuations. Long-term, you very well might improve, but there is definitely short-term risk.

As Kevin said, my recent post explains the new width guidelines - it's not as simple as one number. I also don't think that falling outside of these guidelines is the kiss of death. It could impact CTR and I wouldn't make a habit of it, but some titles are just naturally longer than others.

It really depends on what the before and after look like, how big your site is, how authoritative your site is, and a lot of things that are hard to dig into on a Public Q&A. Personally, I'd say test it - pick the pages where the change has the most value and the current titles are long and try changing a group of them. See how it goes. Doing it in phases and measuring can help you get a better handle on things and even help you tweak the changes as you see what works and what doesn't.

[KevinBudzynski]

Dr. Pete had a great blog post on it: http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

Bottom Line - Write compelling titles (that reflect the landing page) for your audience within the constraints presented in Dr. Pete's blog.

[TheeDigital]

You won't get a penalty from changing them, however a rankings drop is entirely possible.  Try to keep your main keywords in each title and you should be fine.