New (google) local SERPs has 40 character limit on title length
-
Should i change my all the page titles for pages that show up in local SERPs to reflect this new limit? Is there any benefit to leaving it at the old limit and having more keywords in there? Or would there be benefit to conforming to google's new standard and having shorter titles?
-
I think you misunderstood me on "staying true to the page title"
If your website is about selling blue widgets and you page title is "blue widgets - johns widget corp" then you are "staying true to the page title" You are letting people and search engines know that this page is about blue widgets. Also "blue widgets - johns widget corp" is under 40 characters so this would not be the best example.
Your question was if you should change all your page titles to under 40 characters so that your entire page title would show. My answer / advise to you is; if you need more then 40 characters to properly describe your page then you should not change just so that all characters in your page title show.
-
But then every title would look cropped in search results. This seems quite silly.
Also, i completely disagree with you on "being true" to the page titles. For example a local company that sells blue widgets that is named johns widget corp, would rank much better if their title was "blue widgets - johns widget corp" than if it was simply "johns widget corp". If people followed your advice they would rank much poorer.
-
I don't think you should change all the page titles on your site to 40 characters or less just to conform to Google's new local SERPs.
The 40 character limit is what Google will show not what you are limited to use. The best advice I can give you is to be "true" to your page titles. If you need more then 40 characters to properly let search engines and people know what your pages are about then you should. Just don't add (stuff) an extra list of keywords to the end of your page titles.
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
-
New website on new url?
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page). Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson1 -
How Google sees my page
When looking for crawlability issues, what is the difference between using webmaster tools Fetch as google, looking at the cached pages in google index site:mypage.com, or using spider simulator tools.
Technical SEO | | shashivzw0 -
"non-WWW" vs "WWW" in Google SERPS and Lost Back Link Connection
A Screaming Frog report indicates that Google is indexing a client's site for both: www and non-www URLs. To me this means that Google is seeing both URLs as different even though the page content is identical. The client has not set up a preferred URL in GWMTs. Google says to do a 301 redirect from the non-preferred domain to the preferred version but I believe there is a way to do this in HTTP Access and an easier solution than canonical.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en GWMTs also shows that over the past few months this client has lost more than half of their backlinks. (But there are no penalties and the client swears they haven't done anything to be blacklisted in this regard. I'm curious as to whether Google figured out that the entire site was in their index under both "www" and "non-www" and therefore discounted half of the links. Has anyone seen evidence of Google discounting links (both external and internal) due to duplicate content? Thanks for your feedback. Rosemary0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
Meta Title Tags
Hi, Are Meta Title Tag deemed by google to be unique if I use the same phrases by in a different order. For example 3 different pages <colgroup><col width="475"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Online Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing | Invoicing Software |
| Online Invoicing | Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing Software |
| Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing | You will not it is the same keywords just in a different order. Is this unique enough or will google not be happy about it. Thanks Andrew0 -
Title Length Question?
So we have a lot of UGC on our site and so the title of pages is often created by the user and this has created about 400 pages with over 70 characters and I was just wondering what people think. I know typically keeping them short and sweet is the best thing, but what about when it's the user doing it? Should I go ahead and cut off the titles at 70 characters or keep them? I don't see it hurting traffic so I'm basically just looking for opinions right now.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Why do I see dramatic differences in impressions between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Insights for Search?
Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?
Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account0