Google is shortening many of my title tags although they are already quite concise
-
Hi,
Title tags of our website are being truncated by Google even though they can be very short (sometimes < 40 characters) and with very few capital letters. We would like to understand why. Example:
Principal component analysis (pca) in abcde - OurBrand
shows up as:
Principal component analysis (pca) in abcd... - OurBrand
where abcde is the name of a very common software (5 characters), and OurBrand is a 6 characters long string (could be used in either lower case or upper case).
Even when removing the brackets around pca, truncation still occurs...
Any clue why?
-
Thanks Eric,
My title tags are already super-short (sometimes less than 40-45 characters and far less than 487 pixels) but are still truncated by Google as I showed you in my example...
-
Thanks for your answer EGOL. Yep, Google can get so mysterious sometimes.
JP
-
When it comes to title tags, Google will truncate and even change certain title tags, and that depends on several factors. One of those factors is the actual search query used. When it comes to title tag length, keep in mind that there are two things that can influence whether or not it gets truncated or not: number of characters used and number of pixels used. If the title tag is over 65 characters or over 487 pixels it will get truncated.
Take a look at your title tags to see if this is the case. If it is, then you'll just need to use a shorter title tag.
-
We would like to understand why.
I doubt that anyone outside of Google has a good answer for this. For some reason, Google thinks that your page is better promoted to the searcher with the short title.
Sometimes I debate with myself if one of my articles should have a one word title such as "widgets". But, I usually go with a longer (but still simple and easily read) title that I believe will elicit clicks. I used to think that Google was stinking up my clever marketing when they shortened my title. However, now I think that I am a 70-year-old white guy who has lived in rural places all of my life and I have no idea what would appeal to younger people in different parts of the world. So, if Google wants to shorten my title tag the results will probably be good.
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
-
Google Not Picking Up Posts
I am trying to work out why from March 4th Google is not seeing my posts. Our google impressions have dropped from 8,000 to 40. If you put in the full article name with speach marks it does not find it, and instead shows the home page in google. We have not had any warnings. We did have work done on our site but nothing else i could think of to cause this. Can anyone let me know what may have caused this. All articles are original
Technical SEO | | headlinesplus0 -
Product Tags
Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, these are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price (they created pages but I have canonical links in them so that is a non-issue). Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Title tag not changing in Google. Can somebody take a look for me?
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin for the website. The website is http://www.emerypharmaservices.com. It appears on the webpage, the title tag is correct (home page should be Contract Laboratory Research Services for Analytical Chemistry and Microbiology), however, in Google it only says Emeryville Pharmaceutical Services. Could this be due to my settings? Please advise. Thank you
Technical SEO | | leopold49520 -
Google Indexing
Hi Everybody, I am having kind of an issue when it comes to the results Google is showing on my site. I have a multilingual site, which is main language is Catalan. But of course if I am looking results in Spanish (google.es) or in English (google.com) I want Google to show the results with the proper URL, title and descriptions. My brand is "Vallnord" so if you type this in Google you will be displayed the result in Catalan (Which is not optimized at all yet) but if you search "vallnord.com/es" only then you will be displayed the result in Spanish What do I have to do in order for Google to read this the way I want? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Penalized by google. How to find out?
Our webpage performs very bad on some keywords relating to one product. At the SeoMoz-ranking page i can se we are number 9 but we have the highest (higher than our competitors) rating in almost every category (at least 25 of 30) on the keyword difficulty report. How do i find out why this is so, or if we have been penalized by google?On other search-engines (yahoo, bing etc) we are number one! And we have the highest pagerank among the competitors...
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Will google let me do this
Hi i am working on my site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am adding new sections and was thinking about buying domain names that best describe that section and which people would remember. so for example i am looking at adding a tenerife magazine to my site and would like to know if it would be wise to buy a domain name for example tenerife magazine and then have it directed to the section of my site. would this benefit my site in any way and would google allow this. instead of having in2town.co.uk and then tenerife magazine after it, sorry cannot find the slash as i am on a spanish keyborad at the moment, i would like to have something like tenerifemagazine.co..uk etc If anyone can give me advice on this then that would be great. also can anyone let me know if this is a wise idea or not, to have sub domain names on my main site. i would like to know if i had tenerifemagazine under the in2town domain name would it slow the site down or should i consider building a brand new site just for that and then making people aware that it comes under the in2town umbrella many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0