Title Length Question?

[KateGMaker]

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.

[KateGMaker]

It makes sense I'll just need to figure out where to use it on the page.

[NakulGoyal]

I see an opportunity here. If it's user generated, it's relevant to the page content I am sure. Why not truncate it at 95 characters as @Irving recommends and then use the full thing again in the body of the page somewhere. Does that make sense ?

I hope this helps.

[KateGMaker]

Interesting, but I just don't know if it's a problem when the users are creating the content. However I could see someone uploading something for spamming purposes in which case I probably should set a max to it.

I'll have to discuss this more.

[irvingw]

The 70 character rule is based on the fact that Google truncates the title tag in search results after a certain number of characters. You can definitely allow more than 70 characters but i would cut it off at some reasonable point - like 95 characters or so if you have the ability to set max char.

SEOs have tested 255 characters for example and have found that it does not negatively affect SEO currently, however Google changes the game constantly and too many characters in the title tag may one day be considered keyword stuffing, so I wouldn't allow your site to be over run with title tags consisting of 400 characters on every page or you could face the wrath of the G. The fact that the user is doing it is irrelevant, you are responsible for what gets posted on your site.