Well put! I link out to a lot of .gov sites because they contain information that my customers find useful. As long as you are keeping your customers' needs in mind when writing content and/or linking, you are on the correct path.

Doug,

Thanks for the advice but that does not answer my question regarding truncating the description meta tag. Do you have any advice there?

Our descriptions are well written and are, of course, geared towards helping the end user. Some of them are a little long though which is why we are considering truncating them and adding a '...'.

Thanks, Alex

Thanks very much for the replies. We'll avoid automatically truncating the title tag.

We are also automatically truncating the description meta tag, and adding '...' to the end if it is longer than 150 characters. Would you recommend not truncating this as well?

I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?

Well put! I link out to a lot of .gov sites because they contain information that my customers find useful. As long as you are keeping your customers' needs in mind when writing content and/or linking, you are on the correct path.