Title Element length too long?
-
My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it.
Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example.
A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be:
Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums
The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better.
The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long"
So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?
-
The key issue you wrote about, titles that are too long, relates to how well a page matches the topical focus within the title.
Too many words in a title can cause topical dilution if they're all keyword phrases.
In my experience, have the most important / most relevant content at the front of the title relative to the page topic. So from that regard you're doing it properly. Generally speaking, I teach clients to keep the individual page title to 70 characters. Not to prevent dilution specifically, but to ensure the entire title shows up in the Google search results although Google sometimes overrides your given title for one of their own if they think your title doesn't truly match the page focus.
When a title goes beyond 70 characters, if the extra text is brand focused, it's not a terrible thing. Google will still process the entire title, it's just the whole thing won't show up in the results pages.
Having all the titles appended after the unique forum topic with your forum brand is not 100% ideal in regard to matching the individual page topic, however it's perfectly acceptable from an overall branding perspective.
As for MagentoWebDeveloper and his concern with repetition, there is truth to that, to a certain degree, however it's not as major an impact because you do have each title prepended with the individual page's topical focus.
And the more you do to focus on across-the-board SEO, the less concern that becomes.
-
Using "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" many times over and over again may seem a little spammy. If 100% of your threads/titles have "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums", I think you may run into problems. I saw a video 2 weeks ago of Matt Cutts talking about that. I thing it on YouTube under GoogleWebmasterHelp. I know you are not intentionally trying to spam, but 1000 if you have 1000 of those, I don't think anyone can argue it.
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
-
Questions in regard to putting 2-3 keywords in a title tag.
Hi all, Here is the situation. There are two services A and B in the page. B is more like a complement to A (they have something in common). C is the umbrella term over A and B. However, our company focuses more on A (70%) than B (30%). Questions: 1. Can I rank the keyword A for the page, while the page has B? (e.g. A | brand name) Will it hurt the seo, with B being in the page? 2. If I write the title tag this way: A | B | brand name . Will A and B dilute each other? 3. How about this: **A | C | brand name **(the idea behind this: We focus on A, but also include C because we have B in the page.) Does this make any sense? I am a newbie to SEO and I realize that could be confusing. Thank you for any support and explanation.
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
Best Practices for Leveraging Long Tail Content & Gated Content
Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads. Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads. Some considerations and questions: How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met. Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking. Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page? Thank you!
Web Design | | Allie_Williams0 -
How to make my site title H1?
Hi In my Header.php I have the following php code for my title: <title><br /><?php<br />// Generate Page Title dynamically<br />if (is_home()) {<br /> bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('description');<br />} elseif (is_category()) {<br /> single_cat_title(); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name');<br />} elseif (is_single()) {<br /> single_post_title();<br />} elseif (is_page()) {<br /> bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php single_post_title();<br />} elseif (is_404()) {<br /> bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php _e("Page not found", "fungames");<br />} elseif (is_search()) {<br /> bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php _e("Search results for", "fungames"); echo esc_html($s, 1);<br />}<br />?><br /></title> This generates a good title different for every page/post I have on my site. But is now H1. I want the same code if, but with H1 tag somewhere in it. Cant figure it out how to do it! Can u help please?
Web Design | | Catinas970 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
Am I pigeonholing myself with a geo-targeted titles?
I've got a site that ranks very well in my local area for mobile app development related keywords. We use terms like "NYC" and "New York" in our title tags. However I do not believe that this is NORMALLY a "local" geo keyword. The reason that I believe this is because my competitors rank all over the USA (and even in Europe) for these keyterms, but we only rank in our local area of New York. Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago? If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world? The other side of the coin is that if we remove the "NYC" and "New York" keyterms, could we see serious drops in the local area as a result?
Web Design | | Fueled0 -
Can you use a base element and mod_rewrite to alleviate the need for absolute URLs?
This is a follow up question to Scott Parsons' question about using absolute versus relative URLs when linking internally. Andy King makes the statement that this can be done and that it saves additional space (which he claims then can improve page speed). Is this a true and accurate statement? Can using a base element and mod-rewrite alleviate the need for absolute URLs? I need to know before going off on a "change all of our relative URLs to absolutes" campaign. Thanks in advance! Dana
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Meta Title and Description for click through optimization
I have a few years experience optimizing PPC text for click-through and conversion rates. I don't see many web sites that are using these methods for their organic listings generated from meta tags. Why is this? So many meta tags seem to be either keyword stuffed or auto generated. From my research, it seems that keywords in meta tags mean little to search engine optimization other than the fact that vertically aligning keywords from search phrase to listing to landing page is important. (Just like it is in PPC). Now that I am personally doing more than just PPC, I have begun rewriting meta text for increased conversions. The search results look to me like My web site is the only one doing this. Is everyone missing out on something, or am I missing something?
Web Design | | EugeneF0 -
How long does Google take to re-cache a site?
Specifically, I just redesigned my site. I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date. It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?
Web Design | | damon12120