Titles being too long
-
I am in process of trying to help a client (who I also am an associate for) and they have over 600 pages (which are images) that have the same info in their tag, missing description, and you are talking 1500-2k pixels in their title.
I called the host and the owner of the host said "If you were a real seo you would know that the title length doesn't matter." .... help me out here.
-
From a product perspective, we tend to need to set guidelines that can be quantified, but I'm afraid the whole truth is never quite that black-and-white. All else being equal, I think keeping your titles to a reasonable length is beneficial. Long titles don't automatically harm you (there's no Capital-P penalty for it), but they tend to create a few problems:
(1) Often, long, CMS-generated titles front-load repetitive words (like the site name or category/sub-category), which devalues the unique/important words in Google's eyes and is more likely to make it look like duplicate content.
(2) Long titles tend to devalue important words for search visitors as well, which can harm click-through rates. I'm a firm believer that CTR has indirect impact on ranking over time. Even if it had no SEO significance, it's generally bad for engagement and for your site.
That said, it depends a lot on what you're dealing with. If a title of a page is, say, a title of a blog post, and it's just a long title, that's probably fine. If you have 5,000 product pages that all start with "Bob's Discount Propane Warehouse | Propane and Propane Accessories | ...", then that's going to be detrimental to your usability and SEO.
You mentioned images in your reply to Christy -- could you give a couple of examples of the types of pages and titles you're talking about? In general, image-only pages with no additional content (especially if they have near-duplicate titles) are going to be low-value from a search perspective.
-
How he acted kinda made me second guess what I have known all of this time.
SO... With over 600 pages of images where you can not put additional content/wording on each of those pages and each of those pages have long titles, would you guys recommend removing those images from becoming their own pages (since you can't add additional content) and just put them together in different slideshows or tables?
And is it still true that long titles (over 35 or 570 pixels) are not advisable?
-
Hi SeobyKP, that sounds really frustrating! Ugh, so sorry you are dealing with that. Now, what exactly can we help you with? That is, what specific question would you like us to address in this thread?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Christy
-
HA! doesnt matter huh...
download SEO Quake as a chrome extension. Its great stuff. It will grade every page in detail, showing you how long titles and descriptions should be, as well as other metrics. big fan.
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
-
B2b services site, deep long tail services or flat and broad
Hi all, i have a small internet agency with services in several area's.
Content Development | | mdkay
Currently i structud my services in 2 different area's.
General services and specialized products with services underneath. like so:
domain.com/services
domain.com/services/service1
domain.com/services/service2
and so on. domain.com/product
domain.com/product/service1
domain.com/product/service2 domain.com/product2
domain.com/product2/service1
domain.com/product2/service2 But now im thinking of create loads of different services i provide,
there are some overlapping content of course, but all services are still individual.
But i can write a lot of unique content about all the services. But is it smarter to make just a few big pages with the services more bundled.
Or really long tail. Now i have around 15 services pages.
when i make it a lot deeper im talking about 40 pages. Currently my complete website is around 35 pages.0 -
Wordpress Blog Pages, Duplicate Title Tag
Anyone have any experience in fixing the duplicate Title tag on a Wordpress blog multiple pages Basically the title tag remains the same on the pages /Blog/ /Blog/Page/2/ /Blog/Page/3/ My good friend Yoast Plugin doesn't seem to of resolved this (Unless i have missed something?) I don't really see this to be effecting anything and wouldn't of through it would either, but it would be nice to not see the notification within Moz site crawls and campaigns etc, its more of a cosmetic problem Any solutions ? Thanks James
Content Development | | Antony_Towle0 -
Is it black hat to include your city name in a blog title to hopefully help local search resultts
I frequently blog and want to increase my ranking in local search in my area-Boston-blogging about Plastic Surgery. If I write a post about tummy tuck will I be penalized by Google search if I use a title like
Content Development | | wianno168
Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss Boston or Boston Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss0 -
How long should a quality blog post be?
How long should a "quality" blog post be? General advice seems to be that a 300 word post just won't cut it, but advice on the optimum length is vague. I appreciate that all posts are different but is there a rule of thumb, is 1000 words good and 1500 too long...or should they are all aim to be 2000 words? Also with regards to pictures in blogs, can they just be taken from the web or are there sites that I should be using to source the pictures? Thanks
Content Development | | Studio330 -
Title case or lower can URL folders
Is it best to have lower case URLs e.g mydomain.com/hotels-in-london/ or title case like mydomain.com/Hotels-In-London/ I noticed in the seomoz tools that it would report the above two URLs as duplicate if the site had two links using pointing to each URL
Content Development | | NeilTompkins0 -
Leap of Faith - Damm the consequences - Title Tag Change
the crazy things we do mid week. But after reading Cyrus' post on beating Panda I went back to my website design site http://www.grangewebdesign.com which I had set up a plugin which had all my posts setup as Website Design - %%title%% So basically every Title tag had Website Design in front of it. REadingthis post now it suggests that this is bad practice so I just changed it to %%title%% which now of course means that I should perhaps look more closely at the titees I have been using. Was embedding the Website Design in front of the post overkill? thoughts appreciated...
Content Development | | kdaly1000 -
Long versus short copy
Does the search engines have a preference for pages with long or short copy? (Assuming our short copy fulfill the basic keyword requirements) While a long copy, enable us to include more long tail keywords, i find that most people prefer to read a short copy. We currently try to keep each page short and give the reader an option to explorer further with links to more detailed pages.
Content Development | | petersen0