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
-
Can I use £ character in title tag?
Hi - Can you use something like "save £££s" in the title tag. Have looked but can't see an answer. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | StevieD0 -
Help recover lost traffic (70%) from robots.txt error.
Our site is a company information site with 15 million indexed pages (mostly company profiles). Recently we had an issue with a server that we replaced, and in the processes mistakenly copied the robots.txt block from the staging server to a live server. By the time we realized the error, we lost 2/3 of our indexed pages and a comparable amount of traffic. Apparently this error took place on 4/7/19, and was corrected two weeks later. We have submitted new sitemaps to Google and asked them to validate the fix approximately a week ago. Given the close to 10 million pages that need to be validated, so far we have not seen any meaningful change. Will we ever get this traffic back? How long will it take? Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. On another note, these indexed pages were never migrated to SSL for fear of losing traffic. If we have already lost the traffic and/or if it is going to take a long time to recover, should we migrate these pages to SSL? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | akin671 -
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
Homepage target keyword less volume than subcategory keyword
As an example - let's say that I have an online store that sells home accessories. Within my store, I have categories like "kitchen accessories", "bedroom accessories", and "bathroom accessories" among others. Naturally I would want my homepage to be the broadest keyword that best describes my store's offering (i.e. "Home Accessories"). Then, on my sub-category page, I would target "Kitchen Accessories". In this example - let's assume "Kitchen Accessories" has more search volume than "Home Accessories". Would it be better to focus on that keyword on my homepage instead? Example Current Homepage Title: "Beautiful Home Accessories - Crate + Feather" Alternate Homepage Title: "Bath, Bedroom, and Kitchen Accessories - Crate + Feather" Which one would you do assuming everything is equal aside from search volume?
On-Page Optimization | | clarasboutiqueusa0 -
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 -
Less than 1 subdomain Moztrust
This is the website http://www.gbzconsulting.com Not quite sure about the reason that my site is receiving almost 0 subdomain Moztrust. However, the on-page optimization tool show that the home page is ranked A. Any idea what I am missing or what I should do to improve?
On-Page Optimization | | Tel0 -
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 -
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