Google and the Title Element

[elguapo]

Just a little confused here, if you guys can help me:

I know that Google displays only up to 65 characters or so of a title derived from the meta title tag. But if you have a 120 character title, does this mean that Google does not read anymore the 66 and above characters? Or does Google reads it but does not just display the rest in their search results?

So does it mean that you have to maintain short titles or at least 65 characters and less? And does it mean we have to make sure that the important keywords are in the first 65 characters?

I know that the title is only one of the factors and I don't mean to obsess about the metatags, but I was just talking about this to a friend and this got me confused

Thanks

[tedster]

You've brought up a good question, but let's clear up the technical vocabulary first - I've already edited this thread's title to reflect this point. The title element <title>Words</title> is NOT a meta tag. There is a meta title <meta type="title" content="Words"> and from what I've tested, Google ignores it. There is also a title attribute in html <a href="page.html" title="Words"> and that is another critter we don't need cluttering up this discussion.

Here's how I look at it. Google's core product is their search results page, their SERP. They care very much about both it's relevance and the perception of relevance for their user -- and they test both these areas extremely thoroughly. Since they truncate the title tag, it only makes sense that the words before the truncation will get special consideration -- because they will show up in the SERP and later words will not.

I haven't tested the relative strength of a keyword the two positions, before and after the truncation. I'd love to hear from someone who has some solid data. I assume that an after-truncation keyword still gets some extra love from the algorithm, but just not as much. Because of this line of reasoning, I've always written title tags to include the important words as early as possible, and to keep the title quite short.

It would be a weird situation to have a keyword after truncation in the title tag, but not elsewhere on the page or in backlink anchor text. That situation is not likely to occur "in the wild" - so it would need to be an intentionally constructed test. My assumption is that such a page could still show up in the SERP - but not too well ranked. I doubt that Google just throws away the rest of the title - but that's not solid knowledge, just an educated guess.