Page title getting cut off in SERPS even though it's under 70 characters?
-
I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS. It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name. Does a "-" have anything to do with it? Does that translate to an elipsis?
Format:
keywords - website/brand.com
Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?
-
When did you make changes to the title tag? The new title tag will appear in the SERP only when the page is re-indexed by Google.
-
I am not able to confirm the issue you are describing. I have looked up multiple pages with titles of lengths between 65 - 70 characters and they appear completely in SERPs. I suspect the issue you are reporting is specific to a particular character in your URL. I understand you shared there are not any special characters, but there must be something unique about your URLs which cause this problem. Google fully supports longer titles then you are able to achieve.
Perhaps a compromise. Can you share the URL and search term used on one of these other pages which are being cut off under 60 characters?
-
A few questions:
Can you work the brand into the keywords somehow?
Is it necessary to show the brand at the end of the title for Google users?
Do you use the brand in the meta description?
-
As I shared above, it entirely depends on the title.
Without looking at the actual information involved it's kind of like describing a list of symptoms to a doctor. "I have a headache" could be nothing, could be a brain tumor. We need to see the "patient" i.e. the web page and keyword, in order to properly diagnose the issue. Otherwise we are guessing blindly.
-
Unfortunately I can't give that information. The only character I have in there is the "-" before the website name at the end. I typically use pipes "|" but the dash was already implemented across the site. Looking at some of my other clients now, it's starting to look like 70 characters is NOT the standard anymore. I'm seeing consistent page title cut-offs under 60. Ugh.
-
I just checked and that's not the case, I wish it was though. It gets cut-off at 54 characters! Isn't that way too short???
-
I'll fire you an email buddy.
-
What keywords are you searching with? If you add the brand to the keywords does it show the full Title? Google may be truncating the title depending on your query.
Cheers
Rob
-
I don't wish to side track this thread but I have worked with Zoo and to the best of my knowledge you can change the titles just fine.
Zoo > Blog > Items > Name is the article title
On the right side Config > Page Title is the field to control page title
If you have an example of what you feel can't be done, feel free to e-mail me: [email protected] and I can take a better look.
-
If you can offer an exact keyword search and URL, we can probably offer a conclusive diagnosis.
A possibility is one or more of the characters is being converted to a character which cannot be displayed properly. This type of conversion requires multiple characters to represent the single character (i.e. replacing with %E1 so it takes 3 character spaces rather then 1).
-
Hmm, not entirely sure, can you provide a link?
I have seen something a little odd recently with page titles. We are working on our new site, was going to use Joomla and the Zoo CCK but unbelievably, whilst they have a really cool blog system built into Zoo, you can't set page titles so all article titles are the same and it uses the blog title.
But, we are seeing google take the article titles from the H1 and create it's own title tags from these to return the page in the results with a good, clickable title.
Obviously, we are going to change this and go back to Wordpress as it's a dealbreaker not being able to set page titles but the behaviour we have seen from Google in this instance is interesting.
So, sorry, waffling, are your page titles exactly as you have put them? Is it trying to add anything? Do you have any special characters or anything that is causing problems?
I have just done a bit of a random google and I can see lots of page titles getting cut off at around 58 characters in where the page title is longer than that. Lots of other full titles seem to be coming in at around 62 so there must be a slightly earlier breaking point now. Doing a bit of googling it looks like you can get snipped at anything over 64 so I would just work on getting them a little shorter.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
-
Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.
-
Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.
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
-
Page Title & Meta Description Getting Cut Off In The SERPs
Hi Guys, I am trying to figure out why my page titles and meta d tags are getting cut off in Goofle SERPS. My page titles are 70 characters or under (including spaces) and my meta Dd's are 155 characters or under (including spaces) so I cannot work out why They are getting cut off. Is there something I have missed?! Thanks, Meaghan
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Meta titles and description for subcategory pages in CMS websites
I have a CMS based site and for that I am getting duplicate page title and description error message, for my all sub-category pages. What can I do for this because write Meta title and description for each page for CMS based website is not possible.
On-Page Optimization | | 1akal0 -
Why Can't I Get Indexed?
I cannot seem to get my website indexed by Google! I submitted the sitemap using Google WMT about a month ago but only one page is being indexed. There are very few backlinks to the site, so I don't believe there are any penalties due to over-optimization that would prevent indexing. Also, my robots.txt file is properly configured and is not preventing any pages from being crawled. I've tried using the "Fetch as Google" settings in WMT with no luck. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | socialfirestarter0 -
Punctuation at the Start of Page Titles
one of my clients appears to be using an exclamation mark (e.g. "! Graphic Prints By Mirrorin - Fun Childrens Graphic Prints") and to be completely honest, I have no idea if this is bad practice or if it wont have any affect from an SEO point of view? Any help would be appreciated because it is site wide, therefore if it is an issue I would like to be able to get it sorted asap! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
How can i change my landing page title in search engines?
Hi SEO folks, Please help! I've changed my home page title 30 days ago, but my Google search results is still showing the old one! Why is that happening? can I've a brief explanation please so i can learn. thanks a million cRnPa6d
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
Can you 301 redirect to a page that has other pages 301 to it?
Two years ago updated url page to include better keywords and used a 301 redirect from the old page to the new. so www.example.com/keyword-1st-generation.html now points to ... www.example.com/keyword-2nd-generation.html That moved the pages up in ranking, but now have better kw for the url, so is it okay to redirect the /keyword-2nd-geration-html to www.example.com/keyword-3rd-generation.html And what is a good length of time before removing the 1st-generation url? It's been 3 years and there is no chance of using it again. Plus, no sign of it in analytics.
On-Page Optimization | | AllIsWell0 -
Dynamic pages on a static html pages websiite
Good evening everybody. I am new on SeoMoz that I find very helpful in my work. I am not a web developer so please excuse me if my technical language is poor.I have an issue that maybe you can help me to solve. I work for a company who has a website, which is old and very well positioned on google for the most important keywords for the field of the company I work for (dentistry). It is a website made some years ago and it's made of static html pages.I would like to add a section in my website where I can post articles, like a blog (I think of a wordpress-style website) with daily posts (so with a dynamic page). Is there a way to do this without modifying the structure of the website and without losing pages, urls and ranking? We're on the first google page for many keywords of interests in our city and it would be a great damage for us to lose those positions.Thank you very much!
On-Page Optimization | | adec0 -
Duplicat page content issue I don't know how to solve
I've got a few pages (click here to see the fist on with the others as side bar links). They are all thumbnail pages of different products. The tiles are pretty different but the page content is virtually the same for all of them as is the meta description tag. I'm getting error's on the SEOmoz crawl for those pages. I know the meta tag shouldn't be a problem in SEO but is the content of the page going to cause me issues? Are the error messages from SEOmoz a result of the page content or the meta description? The pages are very similar but they are different enough that I want to separate them onto different pages. There would be too many links on that single page as well if all the thumbs where on the same page. Should I just ignore the error messages?
On-Page Optimization | | JAARON0