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Does Google ACTUALLY ding you for having long Meta Titles? Or do studies just suggest a lower CTR?
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I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this?
Thank you!
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I think meta descriptions are important.
They are your first chance to display a call to action to a customer and to get them to click through to your site. Hence a poorly written one, truncated etc. is probably not as enticing as one within the 160 characters - that does not truncate.
We have acted for several clients where we have optimized the MD and improved the CTR by .08% (ie less than 1%) but that has amounted to over 20,000 additional clicks on their site a year.
Also I loved Rand's WBF which indirectly addresses the issue, but correlates with my view, though probably not as strong that dwell time is a significant factor on ranking.
https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday
On your questions directly:-
Will it hurt your SEO? - Yes, two possible reasons
1/ you keyword stuff it.
2/ no-one clicks through because you have a bad MD
On truncation - there are exceptions, but google generally does not if you fit within there pixel/character limit.
My view - draft and implement your MD's properly...
Hope that assists.
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Great question, and I certainly heard the "will this hurt my seo" thing all the time as a consultant. A couple of thoughts...
- To my knowledge, there is no specific algorithmic feature that would lower a page's rank because of too long descriptions
- Long meta descriptions, however, may be truncated (as you pointed out) or ignored and replaced altogether by Google if they find a more appropriate subsection of text on the page.
- A succinct, well written meta description may help with CTR which itself may be a ranking factor
- Google has stated that they want you to write good meta descriptions, for what it is worth.
What I try and say to clients is "are you prepared to build a top 10 website in your industry". If they are sweating good meta descriptions, they aren't ready to compete in the big leagues.
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