Truncated product names

[MickEdwards]

Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question.  The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..."  to place ... to indicate a bit more.

I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this.  Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space.  So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.

[effectdigital]

If you had two different source codes served via user-agent (web-user vs googlebot) then you'd be more at risk of this. I can't categorically state that there is no risk in what you are doing, as Google operates multiple mathematical algorithms to determine when  'cloaked' content is being used - and guess what? Sometimes they go wrong

That being said, I don't believe your risk of garnering a penalty is particularly high with this type of thing

These are the guidelines:

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en

You're in a really gray area because, you aren't serving different URLs - but you _could _be serving different content (albeit only slightly). I say 'could' rather than 'are' as it entirely depends upon whether Google (on any particular crawl) decides to enable rendered crawling or not

If Google uses rendered crawling, and they take the content from their headless-browser page-render (which they can do, but don't always choose to as it's a more intensive crawling technique) then your content is actually the same for users and search engines. If however they just do a base-source scrape (which they also do frequently) and they take the content from the source code (which doesn't contain the visual cut-off) then you are serving different content to users and search engines

Because you've got right down into a granular area where the rules may or may not apply conditionally, I wouldn't think the risk was very high. If you ever get any problems, your main roadblock will be explaining the detail of the problem on Google's Webmaster Forums here. Support can be very hit and miss