Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. How should I shorten my titles?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    How should I shorten my titles?

    Technical SEO
    4
    10
    2539
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • dbuckles
      dbuckles last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DougRoberts
        DougRoberts @DougRoberts last edited by

        Thanks Alex, I had a feeling I'd read something about people trying to use multiple-snippets in a single meta-description to try and get relevant descriptions into the serps depending on the keywords used.

        A bit too dependant on the whims of google for my liking, and if we're talking about an e-commerce site, then it's enough work generating a single quality description for each product let along multiple ones.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Alex-Harford
          Alex-Harford @DougRoberts last edited by

          "If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point."

          That's not always true, but I see you question it later on - I have seen a few examples where people have used long meta descriptions with the intention of the SERPs displaying something different depending on the search made. Here's one I've just found: http://sharkseo.com/whitehat/meta-descriptions/ - though I've just done a search and I got the same meta description ("Dave is a freelance SEO consultant...") for both suggested searches.

          If Google doesn't think your meta description is appropriate there's always a chance they'll replace it with something else on your page or the description from DMOZ.

          You should definitely not add the ellipsis yourself, what if the length displayed is changed for example? I'd just ensure your first 155ish characters are well-written in a way that entices users to want to click through.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • DougRoberts
            DougRoberts @DougRoberts last edited by

            When are the users likely to see the content of meta-descriptions?

            If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point.

            Any effort writing these words is going to be wasted.

            If these words are important in describing/selling the product then I'd reword the meta-description so that these were before the cut off point.

            If you can make your description more concise without losing readability and avoid the cut-off altogether I'd go for that in preference.

            I'm not sure if it's worth truncating the descriptions yourself and adding '...' or just letting the search engine do it. Would the search engine ever use a snippet from the middle/end of a meta-description? (perhaps someone else can answer that?)

            Are these descriptions automatically generated from the page content?

            What do you mean by a little long!?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • dbuckles
              dbuckles @DougRoberts last edited by

              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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • DougRoberts
                DougRoberts @dbuckles last edited by

                Again, think about who's going to be reading the meta description and what you want it to do.

                I like to think of the meta description (along with the title) as a classified-ad for your page when it is displayed in the SERPS. You want to use the description to help entice searchers to click on your page.

                So, make it compelling, put keywords near the front so that they get highlighted, and try to reassure people that they are going to find what they're looking for by clicking on your page. If you can get some benefits in there, then that's even better.

                dbuckles DougRoberts Alex-Harford 4 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • dbuckles
                  dbuckles last edited by

                  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?

                  DougRoberts 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Alex-Harford
                    Alex-Harford last edited by

                    Definitely don't automatically truncate them. It doesn't matter if they're longer than 70 characters, it just means search engines will show an ellipsis after the 70th character on their results pages. Check out the 'SEO Best Practice' section here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • DougRoberts
                      DougRoberts last edited by

                      If you want people to click on these snippets in the serps, also remember that you want to make the titles as appealing as possible. It's not just about ranking, but click though too!

                      I suspect that shorter, more straightforward titles, that closely match the search query, are going to perform better.

                      Take a look at what Amazon do for example (picked at random!):

                      Something like this in the H1:  "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case / Cover With Magnetic Clasp for NEW Amazon Kindle / 6 inch / 2011 generation / Book Style - Black,TeckNet,MT-183-Black"

                      changes in the title tag to: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics"

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • YannickVeys
                        YannickVeys last edited by

                        I wouldn't do the simple "cut". You have to redo 850 titles? I say do em manually. Believe me, title tags are THE most important on page factor. Just truncating them won't give you any more SEO. Making them better and < 70 chars will.

                        Yes it sucks, yes it's a lot of manual shitty work, but it will bring you a lot more SEO wise, than just cutting them to 70 or so chars.

                        Do some proper research into what people are searching for, put your brand name at the end of the title, etc.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        Got a burning SEO question?

                        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                        Start my free trial


                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • ASKHANUMANTHAILAND

                          Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.

                          Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.

                          Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND
                          0
                        • O2C

                          Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.

                          Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks

                          Technical SEO | | O2C
                          0
                        • tgwebmaster

                          Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?

                          I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing?  Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?

                          Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster
                          0
                        • jfmonfette

                          Dynamically changing a title with javascript

                          Hi, I asked our IT team to be able to write custom page titles in our CMS and they came up with a solution that writes the title dynamically with javascript. When I look on the page, I see the title in the browser, but when I look in the source code, I see the original page title. I am thinking that Google won't see the new javascript title, so it will not be indexed and have no impact on SEO. Am I right ?

                          Technical SEO | | jfmonfette
                          0
                        • ElmarReizen

                          Does it hurt to have a dynamic counter in your page title?

                          Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?

                          Technical SEO | | ElmarReizen
                          0
                        • philscott2006

                          Duplicate Title Tag issue due to Shopify CMS

                          Hi guys, I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns. One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products. An example of this is http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
                          http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them. I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows. Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code: **<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />** ** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)** The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled. This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page. The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance Thanks in advance for any assistance with this. Kind Regards Phil Scott Vida Homes

                          Technical SEO | | philscott2006
                          0
                        • A Former User

                          New (google) local SERPs has 40 character limit on title length

                          Should i change my all the page titles for pages that show up in local SERPs to reflect this new limit?  Is there any benefit to leaving it at the old limit and having more keywords in there?  Or would there be benefit to conforming to google's new standard and having shorter titles?

                          Technical SEO | | A Former User
                          0
                        • mosaicpro

                          Multiple title and description change is considered spam?

                          I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months...  will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?

                          Technical SEO | | mosaicpro
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.