Limiting to 70 Characters or Less
-
Some of our top search performing competitors do NOT limit their titles to 70 characters.
How important is the 70 characters or less guideline in getting excellent search positions?
Does having titles greater than 70 characters hurt our search engine positions?
-
To answer your question specifically, the 70 characters limit for page title recommendations is not important at all for "getting excellent search positions", it's a guideline because search engines won't pay much attention to anything after70 characters. It's not a ranking factor.
As Zeph points out, search results will only display the first 70 characters so anything longer than this won't be seen by your intended audience anyhow. Much more focus is giving for the beginning of page titles, and then it fades, the longer it gets - hence why it is recommended to structure your page titles in order of relevance and importance.
So page titles longer than 70 characters will not hurt search engine positions directly, but will prove more likely that their is wasted opportunity and contain stop words unnecessarily.
-
I agree with Neil but I also want to add a couple of points.
Think of it from a UX standpoint. If you are looking at the SERPs when searching, and you see a headline that trails off with three dots like so...does that make you more or less likely to click on that result? In my experience pages that have longer titles and descriptions generally have a lower click through rate. This means that their high ranking is generally less effective (all other things being equal of course).
Also, you need to remember that the algo has many factors and each one may have its own level of emphasis. So maybe these pages that rank better now have a better backlink profile. Maybe they are creating fresh content periodically. This type of activity can offset the fact that their page titles are too long. Unless you are certain that the longer page title is the only reason that they are ranking above you, there is no need to copy that particular strategy...In fact, you should look at other factors like Page Authority and MozRank before you go writing long titles. As my grandmother would say, "if your competitors jump off a bridge, would you do it too?"
Hopefully this helps, and let me know if there is anything else I can do.
-
I would if at all possible adhere to the guidelines as set by for example Google, that they recommend that all title tags are 70 characters or less.
Those sites currently ranking with a longer title tag might find in the future a slight search tweak in Google's algorithm would affect their ranking.
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
-
Is there a limit to the number of duplicate pages pointing to a rel='canonical ' primary?
We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag. We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong? Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time. A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these. Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | dsumter0 -
Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links ! 1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page. 2 . Then we have multistore selection 3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links 4. Then we have a banner 5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products. 6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc) 7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc. There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that. So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page? Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | qgairsoft0 -
Do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page?
do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page? How much less if so? I have some articles on my site. Would i get more of a boost in rankings to pages of my site by placing links in the text of my articles on my site to other pages on my site? Thanks mozzers!
On-Page Optimization | | Ron100 -
Total Links has doubled in less than one month!? Trust and Authority Drop
Hey Guys, Our website has just recently started to manage our website with SEO in mind and there are a few things that I am concerned about. 1. Domain authority, moztrust, mozrank have been dropping. 2. We had 368k links on 6/27 and on 7/11 we had 563k Is this a result of confusion between our www.websitenamehere.com and websitenamehere.com?
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0 -
Has a product portfolio bad (direct) influence on rankings because of less relevant content?
Hey SEO's, I'm wondering if a bad product portfolio of a e-commerce website has an influence (direct) on the rankings because of less relevant content. To show you what I'm thinking about, look at these two situations: 1. E-Commerce website with 3.000 products from different brands (all top brands) but the products itself are not quite up to date 2. E-Comerce website with 3.000 products from differend brands (all top brands) but these products contain allways the top seller items. Is it possible, that Google has an index for "fresh content" or "highly demanded content" or something like this which has direct influence on the ranking? I ask this question besides the fact, that its of course allways better to have the top sellers in a portfolio than not have. But the big thing is: What to do if you don't know which products are best, or you just don't get them from your retailers or some other reason... For Google & Co. its harmfull (I guess) to put a e-commerce website without top-seller products into the top-rankings with high competition!? Any ideas on that?
On-Page Optimization | | videriconcept0 -
How serious an issue is Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)?
Hi, We have about 3000 of these, how serious an issue is this considered? Is it simply the fact that Google won't index the keywords if they are over 70 characters? Could we strip out common words here: 50 Worship Ideas for Small Groups by Stuart Townend | World of Books.com Like 'for', 'by' and probably the '.com'?
On-Page Optimization | | Benj250 -
Number of characters to duplicate content
I wonder how much characters in a page title so it can be characterized for Googleas duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | imoveiscamposdojordao
Sorry for the English, I used Google Translator.
I'm from Brazil 😄
Thanks.0 -
I run a Q&A site, should I limit post questions to 64 characters?
I run a Q&A site (Recessionitis.com), should I limit posts (questions) to 64 characters for SEO purposes?
On-Page Optimization | | 10JQKAs0