How long can a title tag be?

It seems that keyword stuffing in the title tag works

[hamdik]

Recently I noticed some sites that fill their title tags with extremely long lists of keywords.

Browsers do not display title text content beyond the first 100 or so characters. So, most of their title text is invisible to the user. Don't you think it's a stupidly simple spamming trick that Google should be detecting and penalizing?

Unfortunately, I have seen many pages that rank #1 for keywords that never occur in their body text but only in the invisible part of the title text.

This also seems to be the case with Yahoo too.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Welcome to WW Hamdik.

I don't think it's the title tags that are getting the sites you mention their high positions. As you say most SE's don't display titles beyond a certain amount of characters so why would they bother to index them and factor them into the algo?

(BTW I think you may have posted this in the wrong forum.)

[cabbie]

I have more content in my titles than most people have on their websites.
It certainly hasn't done any harm.

[Wizard]

Keywords in title are obviously important. But you don't want your listing look like spammy keyword stuffed nonsense, do you? Who would click on such a title?

And on a long term such methods doesn't pay off, as sooner or later they are going to be penalized.

[rjohara]

Google only displays the first 65 characters of a page title in the SERPs, so I always limit my <TITLE>s to 65 characters. It *may* be that text beyond the 65 will be indexed - I have never tested that and don't know. But what I try to avoid is a title that gets cut off in the middle: if people can't see the words in the title when it appears in the SERPs, I wouldn't expect them to click on it. (And the chopped-off title often looks sloppy and unprofessional.)

[Rocknroll]

I would say try to stay below 70 charaters, you ll be fine.