Google is shortening many of my title tags although they are already quite concise

[trigaudias]

Hi,

Title tags of our website are being truncated by Google even though they can be very short (sometimes < 40 characters) and with very few capital letters. We would like to understand why. Example:

Principal component analysis (pca) in abcde - OurBrand

shows up as:

Principal component analysis (pca) in abcd... - OurBrand

where abcde is the name of a very common software (5 characters), and OurBrand is a 6 characters long string (could be used in either lower case or upper case).

Even when removing the brackets around pca, truncation still occurs...

Any clue why?

[trigaudias]

Thanks Eric,

My title tags are already super-short (sometimes less than 40-45 characters and far less than 487 pixels) but are still truncated by Google as I showed you in my example...

[trigaudias]

Thanks for your answer EGOL. Yep, Google can get so mysterious sometimes.

JP

[GlobeRunner]

When it comes to title tags, Google will truncate and even change certain title tags, and that depends on several factors. One of those factors is the actual search query used. When it comes to title tag length, keep in mind that there are two things that can influence whether or not it gets truncated or not: number of characters used and number of pixels used. If the title tag is over 65 characters or over 487 pixels it will get truncated.

Take a look at your title tags to see if this is the case. If it is, then you'll just need to use a shorter title tag.

[EGOL]

We would like to understand why.

I doubt that anyone outside of Google has a good answer for this.  For some reason, Google thinks that your page is better promoted to the searcher with the short title.

Sometimes I debate with myself if one of my articles should have a one word title such as "widgets".  But, I usually go with a longer (but still simple and easily read) title that I believe will elicit clicks.   I used to think that Google was stinking up my clever marketing when they shortened my title.  However, now I think that I am a 70-year-old white guy who has lived in rural places all of my life and I have no idea what would appeal to younger people in different parts of the world.  So, if Google wants to shorten my title tag the results will probably be good.