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 do I fix Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) errors?
-
I have read through other postings about this issue, but since I have over 400 of these errors I am interested in seeing how to fix this issue quickly.
Does anyone have a ideas or suggetions?
Thanks,
Lisa
-
Lisa, use the plugin @Saijo George recommended: http://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-a-post-title-to-x-characters/
It will do the trick automatically for all pages and it doesn't require any programming (PHP or MySQL) skills.
-
Which db do I export?
I am not sure how to look for the titles either because I can't see them in the SQL database
Thanks,
Lisa
-
I agree with George, manual editing is always the best one.
Export your db, then in excel you can easily spot the titles longer than 70 chars and edit them to be shorter than that.
-
There are a few things you could do. ( NOT that I recommend you do that )
-
Use a plugin that cuts of the title after roughly 69 characters ( http://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-a-post-title-to-x-characters/ )
-
You could eliminate the Brand Name in the Title .. if its automatically appended ( perhaps that is what causes the title to go over 70 characters )
BUT what I would recommend is export out the list of pages that has title over 70 characters and write proper titles for them, its the best option BUT as you can imagine its not going to an easy task. I guess NO Pain NO Gain resonates well here. I would do this for the important pages first and slowly work at them over time.
-
-
if you have a plugin to set your titles you can update your database using excel just be sure to use the len function to be sure that the new titles are shorter than 70 chars.
-
It is a Wordpress site.
-
It really depends on how the backend of your site is built.
On my site, I could edit the title tag on 100,000 pages at once using an excel file (if I wanted to).

-
haha! I get that! Thanks...that answer is something I deserved. I just don't want to do that over 400 times. Is there a quicker way than doing it one at a time?
-
I don't want to sound like a smart butt, but you should reduce the amount of characters in your Title Tags to less than 70 to remove the errors. It is that simple. Anything more than 70 does not display in Google, anyway.
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
-
How long does it take for canonical tags to work
How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer? We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though. Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much. FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
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 | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
?_escaped_fragment_= Duplicate error in Webmaster
Hi I am not sure where this came from ... ?escaped_fragment= But in webmaster we are seeing hundreds of pages with this and thus webmaster is saying that we have Pages with duplicate title tags How do I fix this, or remove it. Regards T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Special characters in URL
Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
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 | | ElmarReizen0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat
MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0 -
Best 404 Error Checker?
I have a client with a lot of 404 errors from Web Master Tools, and i have to go through and check each of the links because Some redirect to the correct page Some redirect to another url but its a 404 error Some are just 404 errors Does anyone know of a tool where i can dump all of the urls and it will tell me If the url is redirected, and to where if the page is a 404 or other error Any tips or suggestions will be really appreciated! Thanks SEO Moz'rs
Technical SEO | | anchorwave0 -
Using symbols in the html title of a webpage
If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
Technical SEO | | mickey11
thus making it rank worse in search engines here is an example <title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> versus <title><br /> ▶ Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3. By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results0