Page title getting cut off in SERPS even though it's under 70 characters?
-
I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS. It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name. Does a "-" have anything to do with it? Does that translate to an elipsis?
Format:
keywords - website/brand.com
Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?
-
When did you make changes to the title tag? The new title tag will appear in the SERP only when the page is re-indexed by Google.
-
I am not able to confirm the issue you are describing. I have looked up multiple pages with titles of lengths between 65 - 70 characters and they appear completely in SERPs. I suspect the issue you are reporting is specific to a particular character in your URL. I understand you shared there are not any special characters, but there must be something unique about your URLs which cause this problem. Google fully supports longer titles then you are able to achieve.
Perhaps a compromise. Can you share the URL and search term used on one of these other pages which are being cut off under 60 characters?
-
A few questions:
Can you work the brand into the keywords somehow?
Is it necessary to show the brand at the end of the title for Google users?
Do you use the brand in the meta description?
-
As I shared above, it entirely depends on the title.
Without looking at the actual information involved it's kind of like describing a list of symptoms to a doctor. "I have a headache" could be nothing, could be a brain tumor. We need to see the "patient" i.e. the web page and keyword, in order to properly diagnose the issue. Otherwise we are guessing blindly.
-
Unfortunately I can't give that information. The only character I have in there is the "-" before the website name at the end. I typically use pipes "|" but the dash was already implemented across the site. Looking at some of my other clients now, it's starting to look like 70 characters is NOT the standard anymore. I'm seeing consistent page title cut-offs under 60. Ugh.
-
I just checked and that's not the case, I wish it was though. It gets cut-off at 54 characters! Isn't that way too short???
-
I'll fire you an email buddy.
-
What keywords are you searching with? If you add the brand to the keywords does it show the full Title? Google may be truncating the title depending on your query.
Cheers
Rob
-
I don't wish to side track this thread but I have worked with Zoo and to the best of my knowledge you can change the titles just fine.
Zoo > Blog > Items > Name is the article title
On the right side Config > Page Title is the field to control page title
If you have an example of what you feel can't be done, feel free to e-mail me: Ryan@Vitopian.com and I can take a better look.
-
If you can offer an exact keyword search and URL, we can probably offer a conclusive diagnosis.
A possibility is one or more of the characters is being converted to a character which cannot be displayed properly. This type of conversion requires multiple characters to represent the single character (i.e. replacing with %E1 so it takes 3 character spaces rather then 1).
-
Hmm, not entirely sure, can you provide a link?
I have seen something a little odd recently with page titles. We are working on our new site, was going to use Joomla and the Zoo CCK but unbelievably, whilst they have a really cool blog system built into Zoo, you can't set page titles so all article titles are the same and it uses the blog title.
But, we are seeing google take the article titles from the H1 and create it's own title tags from these to return the page in the results with a good, clickable title.
Obviously, we are going to change this and go back to Wordpress as it's a dealbreaker not being able to set page titles but the behaviour we have seen from Google in this instance is interesting.
So, sorry, waffling, are your page titles exactly as you have put them? Is it trying to add anything? Do you have any special characters or anything that is causing problems?
I have just done a bit of a random google and I can see lots of page titles getting cut off at around 58 characters in where the page title is longer than that. Lots of other full titles seem to be coming in at around 62 so there must be a slightly earlier breaking point now. Doing a bit of googling it looks like you can get snipped at anything over 64 so I would just work on getting them a little shorter.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
-
Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.
-
Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.
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
-
Duplicate 'meta title' issue (AMP & NON-AMP Pages)
how to fix duplicate meta title issue in amp and non-amp pages? example.com
On-Page Optimization | | 21centuryweb
example.com/amp We have set the 'meta title' in desktop version & we don't want to change the title for AMP page as we have more than 10K pages on the website. ----As per SEMRUSH Tool---- ABOUT THIS ISSUE It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title>and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.</p> <p><strong>HOW TO FIX IT</strong></p> <p>Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags.<br /><br />this is what they are recommending, for the above issue we have asked our team to create unique meta and post title for desktop version but what about AMP page?<br /><br />Please help!</p></title>0 -
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Google's mobile-friendly update. How significant is the impact for us?
Hi guys. Recently I got an email from Webmaster-tools saying our site is poorly optimised for mobile devices, and that it’s going to heavily affect rankings from April 21st. I’m worried to say the least. We literary cannot afford a hit on traffic at the moment 😞 We rank well for niche terms like ‘customised diary’ and ‘personalised diary’. So question... Because we rank well for these very specific searches will we still take a hit on rankings after the update? Won’t our high relevancy for those search terms be enough to keep us high in the results? Also, do you know if this change is specific to the users device? E.g) Someone on a mobile device will get mobile-friendly results, whilst users on a laptop will get different results altogether? I'm just trying to get a sense of how much this update will effect us. Any isights, suggestion, or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Our site. Thanks in advance. This community is invaluable to us 🙂 Isaac - TOAD Diaries.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
What's the best Magento Community blog extension?
We are looking at FishPig's Word Press Integrations extension. has anybody used it? Possibly a dumb question, but is SEO adversely affected by the fact it's a WordPress extension on a Magento site?
On-Page Optimization | | Anne_Marie_English0 -
Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Can soft 404's hurt my rankings?
This post mainly pertains to soft 404's but I recently dropped a few ranks in my main keyword which I have maintained prior to this my better rank for well over 2 years. I participate in NO BLACKHAT and obtain links naturally. I want to describe a few issues that happened prior to my ranking dropping and see what you guys think. I started to receive about a week prior to my ranks dropping DNS issues with GWT. It was weird because when I would use Goole Fetch on those pages they would return just fine so I was not sure what was happening there. I use Google page speed server which did in fact decrease my load time (YEAH!!) so that was cool. About 1 week prior to my rankings dropping I enabled godaddy's Website Accelerator as well thinking that could help even more. Because of this I thought maybe this had something to do with my DNS issues with Google so I decided to turn off my website accelerator with Godaddy and just leave my Google pagespeed service on. I figure I don't need 2 of them anyways IMO. Also at the same time I started to receive a ton (31,000+) html errors with duplicate metadescriptions and titles. I discovered I had an error with my code which was displaying 2 different sets of descriptions and titles for each of these pages. I since then have fixed the issue and waiting for Google to index those pages. Here is were I think I might have been hurting from the drop in rankings. Some months ago (maybe 2) I decided to redirect my 404's to my homepage. Yes I know this is not good now and I have created a proper 404 page which returns the 404 code. I recently started getting a ton of Soft 404 errors in GWT which is what brought my attention to this issue. My question is, could my action of redirecting my users to my homepage as a 404 which obviously was returning a 200 on a page that did not exist be possibly the culprit to my ranks dropping?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich1 -
Page title = h1, or slight variation of it?
I recently found a new SEO tool http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/ It is fast, and has found some site tweaks I need to make. There is a free demo version that crawls up to 500 URIs. I recommend you check it out (I'm not affiliated). One of the conditions it checks for is if your page <title>is exactly equal to your <h1> tag. The fact that they flag it makes me wonder if that's something I should avoid (?).</p> <p>When I googled it I found a variety of opinions. When I looked at Rand's excellent piece on the perfectly optimized page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization I notice that the example Page Title and H1 are slightly different. By design, or a happy coincidence?</p> <p>Any opinions on whether I should make my Page Titles slightly different than my H1 tags to avoid the appearance of over optimization, or some other penalty?</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0
