My title tags in SERPs show only about 520px instead of 600px max

[deeper]

Hi,
many of you may know it: The length of the title tag shown in SERPS is max. 600px, it's not dependant on number of characters. Every expert knows this and every online tool checks the 600px.

But, surprise surprise, most of my title tags, which are 500 to 580px, are truncated! All online tools give me "green", but they are actually truncated. Checking the SERPS with other keywords and title tags it confirms me that Google only shows about 520px at best.

Has G changed their 600px maximum or increased the font size? Does anybody know?

deeper

[tangor]

Unknown to me ...

Have you tested by changing one or two to shorter tags?

Personally use the shortest tag possible for all the obvious reasons. :)

g is moving to "mobile" ... and with some good reason as most of the "web" these days is on phones ... but sadly we have not yet found a lowest common denominator for screen size in that area. Perhaps what you are seeing is g's attempt to display "everywhere"?

.

[deeper]

I know the title tags of a certain site because I recorded their length in pixels and character number. All of them were shown completely in SERPS, but all were near to 600px, most of them between 520 and 590px. Now many of them miss the last word.

Obviously something has changed: [twitter.com...]

"Personally use the shortest tag possible for all the obvious reasons. :) "
There is a lot of wisdom in your funny comment. Unfortunately it's hard to create title tags, which will be clicked and contain the main keywords. You don't have made the experience that short title tags will get additional words by G, which often are not very helpful?
May be the old 512px of 1987 :) are safe.

[tangor]

By "shortest" I mean only the most appropriate FIRST ... and even then I don't personally play with "keywords or long tail" as the article/page has it's own title and if g is too stupid to figure it out or display it there's always Bing ... who gets it RIGHT every freakin' time.

I don't play in pixels. I play in WORDS.

If g wants to be obtuse that's on them, not me.

</hot quite humor, but pretty close to reality>

[deeper]

I guess this is always a good idea: to focuse on the beginning, though even then one has to decide how long this important safe beginning should be.

I deal with H1 similar to the title tag, but it's not meant to be a substitute for the title tag, though both have actually a similar meaning.

[RedBar]

The length of the title tag shown in SERPS is max. 600px

I've never heard of that before however did check it out and you seem to be more or less correct!

However I'm with tangor

I don't play in pixels. I play in WORDS.

Is this supposed to be humour since I don't get it?

May be the old 512px of 1987 :) are safe.

Do you mean 1997 or 2007?

[deeper]

Try googling for "title tag length 600px" you will find many sources and tools talking about it. It's a more or less known fact, that there is no character limit but a pixel limit.
At the moment however it is not true any more, obviously G has made a test (or not only a test?) with a bigger font size:
[twitter.com...]

Yes, 1987 is humour.

[RedBar]

In 26 years of site construction not only have I never heard of it I have also never even given it a moment's consideration since my titles are designed for their primary purpose and not for seeing how many words I can get into a specific space.

There is an optimum title length and format for each widget sector, trial and experimentation will teach anyone what it is.

Yes, 1987 is humour.

Whooooosh ... Meaning that it didn't exist then?

[deeper]

I don't see any contradiction between decribing the primary purpose (content) and filling the existing place properly. You can use use the place effectivly for writing a compelling title (CTR), decribing the content and containing your main keywords. This would be the ideal scenario IMHO, which is not easy to achieve with only three words or 300px.

[lucy24]

no character limit but a pixel limit

This seems a bit rough on visually impaired users who have manually set their displays to an extra-large size, or close-up zoom. “Well, it would be 600 pixels if only you viewed it at the font and size we want you to use. It’s not our fault you can only see the first three and a half letters.”

:: remembering my original 512x384 monitor, back when a pixel was not merely a unit of measure but a physical entity ::

[RedBar]

You can use use the place effectivly for writing a compelling title

Whilst I would totally agree with you about this and it is very common practice especially on newspaper sites for a specific article, the over use of words can also have a detrimental effect especially when targetting 3/4/5 widget keywords.

[deeper]

Ten short words may cover a lot of keyword combinations, but are not nice to read and not an eye-catcher lifting your CTR.

On the other hand usually you need the keywords in the title tag in order to rank on first page of G SERPS. Not ranking on the first page you don't need to invest your brain energy in compelling CTR-titles, because noone will read them.

I'm curious what you and others here think about the worth of keywords in the title tag at their end, beyond 600 (or 512 px or whatever). Usually they are not shown, except the search query covers them, but independant from this, they should count for ranking purposes, shouldn't they?

I have a fine title tag with a short word at its end, "cancer", cancer is an example (the page is about therapy of certain deseases).
"Cancer" is definitely not shown in SERPs, it's truncated, except the search query contains this word.
Does it help ranking with cancer nonetheless? If yes, wouldn't it make sense to use a lot of further keywords unseen at the end of title tags?

[tangor]

Titles/tags that are obviously keyword stuff are not "compelling", and often don't have much ranking joy over the long run.

As for truncation, that is based on the layout, responsiveness, and other factors. It is g's page, not yours, so you don't really get a vote.

If all of your title does not show, perhaps your title is too long?

[deeper]

My titles are no keyword stuffing, but sometimes the last word is truncated. The title tag nonetheless is a nice sentence, but the last word, often an example like "cancer" on a page about illnesses, is dropped due to length.

Example:
Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer

Unless someone is searching with "cancer" cancer will be dropped in snippets. Not a tragedy, even without the last word the title makes sense, though I don't like "..." in snippets.

Should I use "cancer" in the title nonetheless, because it may help ranking with cancer?

[Robert Charlton]

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer

Google doesn't like lists of keywords, or extra keywrods, tacked onto titles, and will often shorten title keyword lists. It also likes to include brand names, if it can, somewhere in the title.

This sounds like such a case, and the truncation may have more to do with Google's feeling about keyword lists than it does about about the px length of the title. The word "cancer" does feel tacked on in this case.

Also, note that Google has been rewriting titles for about 10 years now, and the topic has been discussed so many times that it's not mentioned often any more. Here's an old classic thread that I feel still holds true today for some pages, though increasing groups of words may now be returned as concepts (and/or vice versa)....

Google is now rewriting all my page titles
Aug 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4480232.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Look at your titles and see if this shortening you're seeing is query dependent. That could be a big clue.

[deeper]

Thanks.

I will study the old thread.

I'm a bit surprised that you consider
Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer
as keyword list.

IMHO this is a quite natural sentence (except cancer addition), not like "Holistic therapy, psychological therapy, therapy of diseases". THIS in my eyes is a keyword list, but my example...hm...

Cancer is added artificially, true, I guess that's what you mean with "tacked onto titles", though I see many titles in SERPs, which have any separator, like ":" or "-" or the pipe and in my eyes it helps readability to have a structure like this, i.e., for example, two very short pieces are better to consume than one longer piece. I guess you know what I mean.

Any opinion about the added "cancer" and its value for ranking with "cancer"?

[tangor]

I'm a bit surprised that you consider
Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer
as keyword list.

Chuckles! One person's ordinary sentence is another person's keyword list. :)

Then again, every word is a keyword first, THEN is part of content. Catch 22 stuff, and that's what makes things interesting.

[deeper]

22 stuff?

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases like cancer
would be better, but as I said, it is usually not shown in SERPS and not nice to read, because it is very long. As it is the same with all longer titles, I'm quite sure this is (at least mainly) due to length.

Professional holistic and psychological therapy, serious diseases like cancer
would be nice, but still very long

Professional, and, serious, like are no keywords

[lucy24]

<tangent>
Professional therapy as opposed to what? Amateur therapy? In context, does the word serve any purpose? Seems like it would just be pushing the substantive content of the title further off the edge of the screen. Makes me think of {site} which called all its files “the {blahblah} ebook of {title}” with a total of 31 non-significant characters (I counted) before it got to the part readers needed to see.
</tangent>

Professional, and, serious, like are no[t] keywords

How can “professional” not be a keyword? Back before I stopped tracking keywords at (then) WMT, I was always struck by the fact that they considered “it’s” a keyword. (To say nothing of several synonyms for “and” in a language G happens not to know :))

[deeper]

So you think "professional" is superfluos? Interesting idea.

Holistic medecine actually has some "amateurs" and as the title is dealing with serious diseases it may be a good idea to enhance the professional factor. Furthermore it may encourage clicking to enhance being a professional, because it encourages trust. The whole thing is not about selling pens and paper, you know what I mean? And there is always a discussion about efficiency and scientific evidence in medicine.

There are further pages and fields where "professional" may be even more important, for example when it comes to psychological, spiritual and medical counseling (no therapy of diseases in terms of law). This is done also by amateurs, more or less amateurs.

"Professional" IMHO is not a KW, because "nobody" searches with it. There must be criteria why and when talking of "keywords" and for me its search volume.
G may consider it from a pure technical view: Every search query which appears in SC is a keyword, even if it is a LT keyword almost noone uses. In terms of KW stuffing "professional" is no KW in my eyes.

Or is it necessary to create a title tag where more than two thirds of all words are only filling words like "a", "the", "you", "my", "can" ect? Not with me. They are filling (!) words, right? I don't write big and valuable article pages with some thousand words and then wrap it in a lousy plastic bag, i.e., in a title tag with only one or two weak keywords like "professional" and "holistic" and trying to extra avoid KWs. I respect Roberts opinion, but I have no experience that a sentence like the mentioned one above is considered being keyword stuffing (except the tacked "cancer"). If it were, I guess 80% of all title tags are keyword stuffing.

[tangor]

In terms of KW stuffing "professional" is no KW in my eyes.

It's not your eyes, but what eyes G uses. :)

Though we generally do not discuss actual keywords at WW ... the example has been allowed to stand (and I agree that in this case it makes a difference) that the title/tag would be better served as

Holistic Cancer Treatment

as a far better clickable title than the example, which looks spammy to many, and anyone actually searching for cancer treatments will probably skip "professional holistic" as an oxymoron.

HOWEVER< this all started on why only 512pixels instead of 600 ... and I have to ask once again, do you expect g to adjust THEIR PAGE LAYOUTS for your tags?

[lucy24]

"professional" may be even more important, for example when it comes to psychological, spiritual and medical counseling

In those situations, it seems like people would be looking for words like “licensed” or “accredited” or in some English-speaking regions “qualified”--while in others that would just trigger a “Well, I should hope they’re qualified to do it!”

Besides, “licensed” is a few pixels shorter than “professional” ;)

[deeper]

@lucy24:
Yes, you may be right.

Professional may be a "not so good" translation from my own language, but you have recognized the crucial thing about it.

@tangor:
Noone really knows, what eyes G has, except they show transparency, so we are all forced to use our own eyes. I guess this a big part of SEO.

My own eyes at least never told me being someone using keyword stuffing, for more than 14 years now. My own eyes also tell me that many people prefer not to answer to thoughts and arguments, even in forums, they prefer just to defend their opinion. So I told you why "professional" has its sense and the reasons for using it. And you just say it's an oxymoron. It's definitely not an oxymoron, but hey, maybe you are the one from us both, who is the holistic therapist and not me.

Btw, the example is not really authentic, just similar to a real one. No reason for admins to ban it.

Your example
Holistic Cancer Treatment
is short and has three keywords. So it's certainly no keyword stuffing, though using keywords. So far so good and it's nice to get a concrete suggestion, but in my eyes (you allow using me my eyes as it is my site and profession, knowing my clients?) this is not very compelling for clicks. It's, sorry, boring and abandons place for creating a more compelling title. May be G will add some stuff on the remaining place which does not fit nicely to these three words.

"HOWEVER< this all started on why only 512pixels instead of 600 ... and I have to ask once again, do you expect g to adjust THEIR PAGE LAYOUTS for your tags?"
Why do you say this, imputing me with such nonsense which I never said? Where did I expect such nonsense? Are you bored and seeking for a dispute? You should return to more dispassion and fairness - or may be investing your time better in other threads.

[tangor]

Professional may be a "not so good" translation from my own language, but you have recognized the crucial thing about it.

Again, we are not talking about the same things. Are you posting in English, which is not your primary language, or posting an English translation of what your native language post might be?

If you are posting to an English audience, then I stand by my comments. Holistic and Professional mean two different things and using both together is not actually what you intend.

G, on the other hand, views most holistic stuff with a cautious eye and as lucy24 notes, there are much better ways of communicating than what was submitted for discussion.

THAT SAID, can we both agree that g is under no obligation to display your entire tag if you exceed their formatted display? Can we agree that g can change their layout and font sizes as they see fit for their purpose? Can we agree that g will also change your tags/titles without your input at any time?

I truly want to be agreeable, but I can only be agreeable when we are all on the same page: it is g's serps FIRST. We, as webmasters, can manage what we give to g---and should do our best in that regard.

Trying to keep this on topic re: "512px v 600px".

In the final analysis one should title/tag their pages as they see fit! I highly recommend that you, as the webmaster, will best know what to do in that regard---it is your content. My only suggestion is to keep the title/tag as short as possible, as clear as possible, and damn the keywords. G has pretty much removed all the power of that old strategy of "web SEO magic in the title" over the last 10 years.

g (and Bing!) are all about the CONTENT of the page, not the title.

[tangor]

.... as martinibuster constantly reminds us: RELEVANCE!

A title is your first shot to get a reader. Your first paragraph is your only shot to KEEP that reader. Everything else is after the fact.

[tangor]

@deeper ...

but hey, maybe you are the one from us both, who is the holistic therapist and not me.

I have a medical background. Holistic means something different to me, so if I offered offense it was NOT intended. I agree that some home/traditional remedies are very beneficial. Treating cancer, not so much. On that topic we must disagree. That said, this part of the discussion is out of bounds at WW FOR BOTH OF US.

[deeper]

I have a medical background. Holistic means something different to me, so if I offered offense it was NOT intended. I agree that some home/traditional remedies are very beneficial. Treating cancer, not so much. On that topic we must disagree. That said, this part of the discussion is out of bounds at WW FOR BOTH OF US.

O.K. let us clear this, even if we may only agree to disagree. Not sure what exactly you mean with holistic, but the (more or less invented) title is also talking of psychological therapy and I doubt you really know the broad range of "holistic" medicine, which may even used by some hospitals and doctors. And you may think about the meaning of "professional", i.e. having made an official course and licence, having practical experience ect. Last not least you may have better thought some seconds about different dealing with medicine and therapy depending on country and laws there. In short words: Considering "professional holistic" as oxymoron was at least hasty and may be prejudiced.
And that shows exactly why it is important to emphasize a professional work... while I'm not sticking to an certain word like professional, as I don't need the title tag in English.

It's just an example and I will find a shorter title.

You say "damn the keywords", but your short suggestion of three words has three keywords... and you say all is about "relevance" instead? Keywords do "transfer" and signalize relevance, don't they? It's the most important (not the only one) factor for G to recognize relevance. And it's also a quite natural thing:
Having a big article about holistic treatment and therapy of cancer of course "holistic treatment therapy cancer" are my keywords. Should I lie and avoid these words as keywords or not trying to create a nice sentence including this words?

You say all is about content, not title. Don't you think it's quite normal and desirable also in terms of G to have a title which reflects this content?

THAT SAID, can we both agree that g is under no obligation to display your entire tag if you exceed their formatted display? Can we agree that g can change their layout and font sizes as they see fit for their purpose? Can we agree that g will also change your tags/titles without your input at any time?

I truly want to be agreeable, but I can only be agreeable when we are all on the same page: it is g's serps FIRST. We, as webmasters, can manage what we give to g---and should do our best in that regard.

This is self-evident and obvious and I did already answer it clearly. Did you really read my posts or do you just see what you want to see? Why do you still "suppose" me to think so? Not with one single word I demanded G to change anything in my sense or doubted their right of the owner. The only thing I'm talking of the whole time is the length in pixels for deskop, the equivalent of the former 600px and finding proper titles for the existing length, whatever length. And I asked for the ranking power of title words below 600px.

G may use 60, 600 or 6000px, but whatever they use and they can use of course what they like, how can I stick to Googles rules if they are unclear? That's the point. If they want change the title length monthly I would not appreciate it, but sure I would have to deal with it. I just would like to know, if and how they change it. Is that really so hard to understand, so that you still prefer interpreting my posts as obviously silly (G should behave as I want them to do), while there is no evidence at all for this?

They can do what they want, sure, but if there are no good reasons against it, more transparency would be nice. So, no I don't expect them to reveal their algo and in many similar issues everybody would do the same like G, but yes, why not saying "hey, today we changed the font size or we shortened the length down to 500px, but we may have exceptions and it may change again soon."
Does this make me to a bad or stupid guy, an enemy of G? I suppose G would not think so.

[tangor]

You say "damn the keywords", but your short suggestion of three words has three keywords...

All words are keywords, period. That's what they are.

HOWEVER, a title is what you make it. The more to the point the better. If it is three "keywords" so what?

You describe a thing or you don't.

I am so done with this. No attacks were made, no intent to insult, and yet thee comes a time when lack of communication indicates it it is time to stop.

I wish you well in the future. Hope you can figure out how to get the "rest of the pixels".

holistically (the entire, the all, the whole of a thing) SEO is bits and pieces, and one of those pieces is having a tag/title that makes sense, inspires clicks, contains action/keywords, and gets the job done ... and most times in 40 characters or less.

Good luck!

[Robert Charlton]

deeper, this thread gets longer each time I get back to it, but the points that haven't been addressed are still missing. As such, my answer, which includes a bunch of fine points, has gotten stretched out, as it's getting necessary to explain a different number of contentious points as the thread goes on.

What I'm going to do is to do something only a mod or admin can do, (and shoujld do only rarely). which is to lock the thread temporarily. I'll give you a relativelyl succinct answer first, and then lock the thread to stop the posting until I complete and post my longer version of the answer, most but not all of which I've written.

But first, the short version is that...

Google adds an ellipsis to the end of your title before the word "cancer", making the title longer. It also needs to allow room to make some characters larger, because, if they are included in the query, they are made bold and will occupy more room.

As I look closely at the *character* count (which obviously affects the title length in pixels), in English it's easily possible to lose two words at the end of the title while keeping it at under what should be an approximately correct character count (which is 70), but with too many pixels. In a language like German, I can see where you might even lose three words if an affected word were, say, a compound word and particularly long. A lot also depends, I'm thinking, on the title checker used. You can see it clearly on Moz, which I believe does it right in this case, but I'm not fully sure of that.

See some notes on what I see in Moz in the next post.

(continuing on next post)...

[Robert Charlton]

(continuing... and my apologies for taking so long, but the subject had really gotten off topic, and I need to completely reword what I'd written. Please forgive some repetition in spots.

A bit of review for common title stats... 600 pixels approx equal 70 characters and is considened max display width.

10 pixels = 1.25 characters ...

...so 1 calculate that, 1 character = approx approx = 8 pixels. But characters do vary widely in width.

Average title is is 55 characters long, with average being 50-60 char. 600px, the maximum width = 75 characters... but, again, search engines need flexibility to adjust displays, allow for bold highlight, and to make sure that the don't chop into words, so they tend to err on keeping things smaller than their max.

Going back to the first example title deeper posted...

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer

At first I wasn't sure what the asterisk meant, whether it was equivalent, say, to an equals sign, but I came to take it as symbolic, not to be counted, and that you weren't going to include it in your title. Before I did that, though, I had done a character count, and I leave it below, as it's slightly instructive.

Regarding precise and approximate measures of display length... in the US, anyway, since Google has eliminated the ads on the side and widened the content column, my rule of thumb for title length has been to keep a title less than 70 characters *if* it doesn't contain many caps or wide letters. Lots of lower-case "L"s and "i"s usually make a 70-character count a given.

But if the title lengths were full, or if you've got very many wide letters, like "M"s or "W"s, or a lot of upper-case characters, or many bolded queries returned, the pixel width of the title tag would increase, and, if it gets wide enough, three-dots representing an ellipsis may also get added at word breaks so the beginning part of the title will fit.

Words going beyond the ellipsis do get indexed, but, again, they are not visible to the searcher... Also, note my remarks below about proximity effects.

Google avoids breaking up a word itself, so truncated titles often tend to chop off words before the end, just to make sure there's room. 70 characters is considered a good rule for the max width, even though 600px is the spec. 70-characters at 8px per character, which is 560px,

These breaks are for display, not indexing, but of course searchers can't see what's chopped off beyond the ellipsis. Reading suggests that an ellipsis itself is about 3-characters long, including dots and leading and trailing spaces. Also, the last time I tested this, there is a proximity algo at work between words in a title, and you might lose the phrase connection between keywords at the beginning and keywords at the end. of a title.

How exactly Google chooses break points is not always clear or consistent, but the interruption is between words, never with a word. Common wisdoml is to stay below 70-char if you don't want to get words chopped off.


I ran some test with the Moz Title Tool, which I know that Dr Pete built including character width as a factor, and, iirc, I was at a presentation in San Francisco when he first introduced the tool and took questions, so I trust it more than some more anonymous tools.

Again, here is deeper's submission of an example in English, taking to account the word breaks and line lengths anticipateed, with roughly the proper word lengths. What I'm about to do is see how this title does on the Moz Title tool, which I use to check crtical truncation breaks, and to see if I can figure out what's getting shortened.

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer

The Moz tool is on this page...

Moz 2019 Title Tag Best Practices
https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag [moz.com]

Now, here are some word-by-word title character counts, that I'd use in guess-timates, with the example title deeper posted (not counting the end hyphen I'm using for clarity after the title, between the title end and the character count).

---

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases * cancer - 76 characters...
--- (end cutoff in the tool still shows "serious ...)" (While a truncation is to be expected from a width of 76 characters, I wonder why it chopped off "diseases". Thoughts below....
- 67 char approx = 536px, getting down there into complaint territory

---

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases cancer - 74 characters to end of "cancer"
--- (end shows after split as "serious ...) (ie, both words of "serious diseases" drop, which is perhaps to be expected as above, but perhaps a surprise, as it would seem that dropping "cancer" and the leading space alone would eliminate 7 characters and bring it down to 67. Not so, but an important clue, perhaps a discussion point all by itself.

My theory is that the programming of the tool could be such that when two words are dropped because they exceed the pixel count, the programming initially scores the second word, "cancer", as exceeding the 600 px by itself at the end... and this adds an ellipsis between the words "serious" and "diseases".

--=

Professional holistic and psychological therapy of serious diseases - 67 characters to end of "diseases"
---(in the Moz tool, this is the first title submission that suggests that the entire title will appear. If that's the case, it may be that less is more, as anything thats inevitably going to include ellipses may nibble back further into the title for safety. It's possible I'm completely misinterpreting something about that the tool shows. Also, there's got to be a mechanism in Google for keeping the display ed title from disappearing entirely if long submissions are made. ;)

Anyway, IMO its odd that the fullest version of the title that the Moz Tool suggest will be displayed is the longest full version that doesn't get truncated when submitted. This also suggests that the strategy of submitting longer titles, where you assume that the whole title will get indexed and that those non-displaying keyword will count (and in the past I've agreed with that assumption), might have a downside of not fully displaying. It may also be that Google caught on to longer submissions that buried keywords at the end, and that something has changed.

----

I should add that all of the above is conjecture, based on the tool results. One would have to compare what's submitted and displayed in the tool with what gets indexed and displayed in the Google SERPs, and perhaps also to look at other tools. I chose the Moz tool mainly because I know the thought that went into an earlier version of it. And in fact, I've always assumed putting the the Brand Name at the end, will get the Brand Name indexed, and get most of the rest of the title displayed. Now, I'm wondering if there's a trade-off... get it all indexed, but less of it will show. Doesn't seem right. Consider this as a 4am work in progress.

I'd love to get reports back that this is all wrong, and that there's a much cleaner, simpler explanation. In any event, I'm hoping this does get some thoughts going.

More maybe later about the difference between a list and a sentence. No time for now to elaborate on that.. which may be an entirely separate reason for why the titles are being edited. I have that mostly written. Just too late to submit.

(Sorry for closing the thread for a while. It seemed necessary.)