Does having several long title tags hurt you?
-
Our title tags are dynamically generated, and some have over 140 characters.
Does having a large quantity of URLS with an excessive number of characters hurt you in any way?
-
The extra 70 characters can help - Google DOES index them: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday
If you can, make sure the first 70 characters are most relevant to the page content, and readable for the user - if they don't like what they see or it doesn't make sense without the other 70 characters they're unlikely to click through.
You don't mention whether your brand name is included in the tag; unless you're really well known in your niche it usually makes sense to have the brand at the end of the title tag (if at all). I'm an SEO for a couple of news websites where the titles are often well over 70 characters (with the brand names at the end). It doesn't seem to cause any serious problems and we have had high traffic from SERPs with longer titled articles. I advise the editors to put the main keywords near the beginning of the title if possible, with readability (for the human!) being the most important thing.
-
It won't create a penalty per se, however search engines will be truncating your title tags with a '...', meaning you don't have control of how your title tags look. You're better off trimming them down to something shorter and meaningful, knowing that the appearance of your meta data on SERPs affects your CTR, which affects ranking. Plus, the extra 70 chars aren't helping you, because Google isn't indexing them.
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
Question about structuring @id schema tags
We are using JSON-LD to apply schema. My colleague had question about applying @id tags in the schema parent lists: While implementing schema, we've included @id as a parameter to both the "list" child of "ListItem" of a "BreadcrumbList" - on the same schema, we've added an @id parameter to mainContentOfPage and both @id parameters are set to the pages URL. Having this @id in both places is giving schema checker results that have the child elements of "mainContentOfPage" appearing under the "list" item. Questions: is this good or bad? Where should @id be used? What should @id be set to? Thanks for the insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Do Structured Data Errors Hurt Your Rankings
Hi, I noticed we had a 161 structured data erros. Almost all of them said "Update missing." I included screenshorts. Are these hurting me? If so, what can I do to fix them? Thanks, Ruben UfzeAFi YjLhimj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Does a UTM tag influence the linkvalue?
Will Google value a link with a UTM tag the same as a clean link without a UTM tag? I should say that a UTM tag link is not a natural link so the linkvalue is zero. Anyone any idea how to look at this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Crazy long weird URLs... help
I have a HTML website, mysite1.com, and I placed a link on the home page to another one of my sites, mysite2.com Today I checked the links to mysite2.com in Majestic and noticed 24 links coming from the mysite1.com instead of just one link. The URLs from mysite1.com that are showing in Majestic are like this mysite1.com/?epl=4donafvFK3fMXxZXMWQRQLodmPchoXCK5C7-kbBv_agkwlkJrZAoaSDVUlhqFmUqt0f8c2Q6jF6GO6DNMnbidqRsikriF-IEBEt5okmICLEB0FxP36GrsxoPGQ3SGBo1PVR7itDUA4CYmjypn5gi mysite1.com,was inherited from a friend and I believe that it was originally built in Frontpage. Can you tell me how I can get rid of these multiple links as I only want 1 showing from the home page Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Why Put an H1 Tag On A Product?
Why would you put an H1 tag on a product name? I came across this in another forum and thought I'd float it here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
301 Redirect - How Long Until Recovery?
How long after one moves a page and sets up the 301s should the site take to regain its previous rankings? Context: i've ported a site to a new framework. Along the way, several high ranked pages needed to have new URLs setup, as well as the site moved from www.domain.com to simply domain.com. About 1 week after the change, the site's traffic went down 70% and has been there for about another 2 weeks. I suppose it could be something about the new framework that is causing problems though according to SEOMoz tools, the new framework is checking out pretty well. I assume the problem is reconciling all those old www inbound links with the new non-www location. It is all 301'd however ... so it should be working, but is not. So my questions are: 1. How long should it take Google to reconcile these changes and put us back to original SERP positions 2. is there something inherently problematic with switching from www to non-www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NealCabage0