How should I shorten my titles?
-
I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?
-
Thanks Alex, I had a feeling I'd read something about people trying to use multiple-snippets in a single meta-description to try and get relevant descriptions into the serps depending on the keywords used.
A bit too dependant on the whims of google for my liking, and if we're talking about an e-commerce site, then it's enough work generating a single quality description for each product let along multiple ones.
-
"If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point."
That's not always true, but I see you question it later on - I have seen a few examples where people have used long meta descriptions with the intention of the SERPs displaying something different depending on the search made. Here's one I've just found: http://sharkseo.com/whitehat/meta-descriptions/ - though I've just done a search and I got the same meta description ("Dave is a freelance SEO consultant...") for both suggested searches.
If Google doesn't think your meta description is appropriate there's always a chance they'll replace it with something else on your page or the description from DMOZ.
You should definitely not add the ellipsis yourself, what if the length displayed is changed for example? I'd just ensure your first 155ish characters are well-written in a way that entices users to want to click through.
-
When are the users likely to see the content of meta-descriptions?
If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point.
Any effort writing these words is going to be wasted.
If these words are important in describing/selling the product then I'd reword the meta-description so that these were before the cut off point.
If you can make your description more concise without losing readability and avoid the cut-off altogether I'd go for that in preference.
I'm not sure if it's worth truncating the descriptions yourself and adding '...' or just letting the search engine do it. Would the search engine ever use a snippet from the middle/end of a meta-description? (perhaps someone else can answer that?)
Are these descriptions automatically generated from the page content?
What do you mean by a little long!?
-
Doug,
Thanks for the advice but that does not answer my question regarding truncating the description meta tag. Do you have any advice there?
Our descriptions are well written and are, of course, geared towards helping the end user. Some of them are a little long though which is why we are considering truncating them and adding a '...'.
Thanks, Alex
-
Again, think about who's going to be reading the meta description and what you want it to do.
I like to think of the meta description (along with the title) as a classified-ad for your page when it is displayed in the SERPS. You want to use the description to help entice searchers to click on your page.
So, make it compelling, put keywords near the front so that they get highlighted, and try to reassure people that they are going to find what they're looking for by clicking on your page. If you can get some benefits in there, then that's even better.
-
Thanks very much for the replies. We'll avoid automatically truncating the title tag.
We are also automatically truncating the description meta tag, and adding '...' to the end if it is longer than 150 characters. Would you recommend not truncating this as well?
-
Definitely don't automatically truncate them. It doesn't matter if they're longer than 70 characters, it just means search engines will show an ellipsis after the 70th character on their results pages. Check out the 'SEO Best Practice' section here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
-
If you want people to click on these snippets in the serps, also remember that you want to make the titles as appealing as possible. It's not just about ranking, but click though too!
I suspect that shorter, more straightforward titles, that closely match the search query, are going to perform better.
Take a look at what Amazon do for example (picked at random!):
Something like this in the H1: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case / Cover With Magnetic Clasp for NEW Amazon Kindle / 6 inch / 2011 generation / Book Style - Black,TeckNet,MT-183-Black"
changes in the title tag to: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics"
-
I wouldn't do the simple "cut". You have to redo 850 titles? I say do em manually. Believe me, title tags are THE most important on page factor. Just truncating them won't give you any more SEO. Making them better and < 70 chars will.
Yes it sucks, yes it's a lot of manual shitty work, but it will bring you a lot more SEO wise, than just cutting them to 70 or so chars.
Do some proper research into what people are searching for, put your brand name at the end of the title, etc.
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
-
How do I prevent duplicate page title errors from being generated by my multiple shop pages?
Our e-commerce shop has numerous pages within the main shop page. Users navigate through the shop via typical pagination. So while there may be 6 pages of products it's all still under the main shop page. Moz keeps flagging my shop pages as having duplicate titles (ie shop page 2). But they're all the same page. Users aren't loading unique pages each time they go to the next page of products and they aren't pages I can edit. I'm not sure how to prevent this issue from popping up on my reports.
Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm0 -
Duplicated titles and meta descriptions
Hi, Dealing with both my duplicated titles and meta descriptions i'm wondering if there's a "quick" win I could potentially implement asap. A bit of background:
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Say I've 4 pages structured that way: domain.com/us/productA.html for the US domain.com/gb/productA.html the UK domain.com/fr/productA.html for France domain.com/de/productA.html For Germany At the moment, both my page titles and meta-descriptions are duplicated all over the place for product A.
Title is reading "Product A - company name"
MD is a bit better, being translated in all 3 languages (En, Fr, DE). Therefore being the same for the US and for the UK. Ideally, I would get unique page titles and MD all over the place. However, due to time and resource constraints, I can't make it happen overnight. So my questions are pretty simple:
1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted. Ideally speaking, both my page titles and MD would be completely unique but I can't afford doing so in the short term. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Duplicate Title tags vs. View All for search results
I run a directory and some search queries give almost 1000 unique results. My moz campaign tells me that I have around 1,300 duplicate title tags etc. I read online about canonical, rel=next/prev, also about having a 'view all' page just for google (page links, not search queries), but if I do this, wouldn't the slowness mean google won't index it? So the question is what is the best thing to do?
Technical SEO | | tguide0 -
Missing page titles
Does anyone know why my SeoMoz crawl reads my page titles differen't to what they truly are on my active site? I changed my pages titles and optimised them several months ago. Is my old page titles still been crawled rather than the new ones how do i fix this is?
Technical SEO | | gimes0 -
Why do I get duplicate page title errors.
I keep getting duplicate page title errors on www.etraxc.com/ and www.etraxc.com/default.asp, which are both pointing to the same page. How do i resolve this and how bad is it hurting my SEO.
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Title Tag Wordpress
I need to know how can I personalize the title tag individually in my categories?
Technical SEO | | nafera20 -
Does daily changing of price information in a title tag damage SEO?
Hi I'm thinking about changing the title tag for all my pages daily, updating it with the most current price information. (As I think this could improve CTR) All the other keywords in the title tag would remain the same however. Does anyone think this is likely to cause a problem with regards to ranking in Google and other search engines? Thanks for any / all replies! Cheers
Technical SEO | | joeprice0