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.
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
How to generate an automatic title and meta description for lots of pages
Hi, I'm working on a big website that will have new pages every month. I would like to find a plug-in or something free to generate automatic title and meta description for futur new pages. Thanks you for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | Maely0 -
Page Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
Page Title in Local SEO Title Tags?
Hi All, Still working on my title tag usage for local SEO, and I was hoping for some more feedback. My question is this: In Local SEO titles, I'm using location + keyword combinations, unique on each page. However, since each page has a specific title for the client, I figure I should be placing that at the front. My thought here was that this helps with the overall usability to the reader of the website. Ex. Contact Us page for Pizza shop Contact Us | Springfield IN Gourmet Pizza | Moe's Italian Pizza Anyone have thoughts on this one? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | kbaltzell0 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
Should I include a "|" for better page title SEO results?
I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice. Example: Product Name | Company Name Instead of: Product Name by Company Name I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words. I wanted to make sure. Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.
On-Page Optimization | | JedHenning0 -
Hiding Page Titles By Display None
Hi. I am new to this community, and new to SEO as well. A friend asked me to give them suggestions on onsite optimization for their Drupal website. I know page titles are very important, and usually they should be set to H1. (At least I think) This particular website has all their page titles set to H2 and they are using display:none in their stylesheet to hide them for graphic design reasons. What would be the most practical work around for this? We don't want this to appear sketchy in the eyes of the SE's, but putting page titles at the top of their pages really would take away from their graphical design. The second issue is that they use a module called Quicktabs for tabbed product specs on each page. Each tab is actually pulled from a post (called a node in Drupal), so each tab has it's own title that is an H2. So not only are they hiding the main page title, but they are hiding 5 others within the tabs, and their are 6 H2 elements showing up on each product page all set to display:none. Any creative suggestions? Hope that makes sense.... Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | aprilm-1890400