Moz says "Title Too Long", Yoast says title is the perfect length. Who's right?
-
For a bunch of my pages, the MOZ Crawl Report says "Title Too Long". Yoast on my site tells me that the titles are the correct length. How can these two things be at odds with each other? Which one is right?
-
Am I right in thinking that having increased the acceptable length for meta descriptions Google have now reverted to the old length? Yoast is now saying that meta descriptions that were OK are now too long.
-
Thanks for your response. I really appreciate it!
-
Like anything in SEO, there isn't an exact answer. It's partly because Google shows titles of different lengths depending on what size screen it's showing on. It's also because characters can be different pixel widths. For example, an "i" is not very wide, while a capital "M" or "W" is a wider character, just by the nature of the letter itself.
Yoast openly states that the optimal title length depends on what kind of result is going to be shown, so their advice is to make sure your keyphrase is within the first half of your title and not stress about exact character count or pixel width.
Moz keeps a close eye on this as well, and their research concludes that approximately 50 to 60 characters, or 600 pixels, is the optimal length, and it will show on about 90% of search results. Moz Pro reports that anything over 570 pixels is too large, though, so if you're under their 600px recommendation you can still get the warning that your titles are too long.
All things considered, as long as you're not grossly outside of either target - 60 characters or 600 pixels - I'd take it with a grain of salt and consider just marking "ignore" on the titles that are close to tolerance. There are no hard and fast rules - except the rule that Google will continue to change - and we may see shorter or longer limits in the future. Tweaking your titles to exactly within both tools' tolerance is probably not going to get you the best return for your time - see what other more high-priority issues you have, like 404 errors or missing meta descriptions. (Change case in point, Google just changed their meta description length maximum.)
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 only crawling 2 pages
Hi, I found a similar thread, but it did not provide a clear-cut answer. We have had this campaign running for over a year, and we are always adding content to the website, but Moz is only ever able to crawl 2 pages, Screaming Frog only picks up 12, but I know there is a lot more than that. None of our pages are set to no-index, so I do not know what is causing this. Welcoming any ideas/solutions. Thanks
Moz Bar | | GavinAdv0 -
Moz Crawl - 804 : HTTPS (SSL) error encountered when requesting page.
Got an issue sending a Crawl Request to https://www.usernamebuddy.com/ " "804 : HTTPS (SSL) error encountered when requesting page." I have tried to recrawl several times now same issue keeps occurring. I cannot see an error when I access the site am I missing something, if so how can I diagnose the issue and sort the problem? I have reviewed the source and cannot use any http: resources.
Moz Bar | | GrouchyKids0 -
Annoying Popup saying "authentication required"! How do I resolve this?
I utilise the Moz bar quite rigourously as a content marketer but i'm having an annoying popup every second. Moz kept bugging me with a popup bar saying: "authentication required" asking me to input my username & password. Though filling it in correctly, it keeps bugging me every second. Sometimes even when I have disabled the toolbar it keeps poping up! How to resolve this?
Moz Bar | | iPrice_Marketing1 -
Duplicate Page and Title Issues
On the last crawl, we received errors for duplicate page titles and some duplicate content pages. Here is the issue: We went through our page titles that were marked as duplicate and changed them to make sure their titles were different. However, we just received a new crawl this week and it is saying there are even more duplicate page title errors detected than before. We're wondering if this is a problem with just us or if it has been happening to other Moz users. As for the duplicate content pages, what is the best way to approach this and see what content is being looked at as a "duplicate" set?
Moz Bar | | Essential-Pest0 -
MozBar "Page Load Time" result -140... seconds
Hello all, I have gone through a lot of work to optimize the page size and load time for my site (http://goo.gl/0SYrns) Here is the result: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140618_6V_PDZ/ And my competitor (http://goo.gl/j7YBcn😞 http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140618_TN_PGP/ According to that tool (and many others) my site is considerably faster than his. However, when I check in the MozBar, the result for mu site is less than 0, around 1 second but his is -1403106240.403 seconds. So how do I get to such a result? I did everything, optimization, cds, etc...
Moz Bar | | branimir.morfov0 -
My 301 Error and Duplicate Title Content Issue is Growing !
When i redirect some of my page - it shows error. not redirecting and i made this 3-4 months before, no effect. All Errors under each category make me gone sick.
Moz Bar | | Esaky0 -
Rel Canonical and Moz Crawl
we have Rel Canonical tags set up on a few pages. When viewing the page source, the tags are correct. However, Moz Crawl results show the opposite. for example the page source, correctly shows, URL X with a Rel canonical Tag of URL Y
Moz Bar | | S.S.N
but.. Moz crawl is showing URL Y with a Rel Canonical Tag of URL X ..any thoughts why this would happen? which should i trust more?0