Alta title length?

[Brett_Tabke]

Did alta increase the number of chars allowed in titles? I'd swear (I have it written down), that it was 81 characters. I'm finding sites with more than that listed right now.

[seth_wilde]

I think it has always been 79 characters. I haven't noticed any exceeding this (although I haven't looked much)........have any examples?

[Brett_Tabke]

I was finding many yesterday that were up to 89 chars. I can not find a one today. Next time it happens, I'll keep the page.

[Brett_Tabke]

First result under 98 [altavista.com]. Not sure what is going on there. I assume the page doesn't have a title and alta is picking up on something that is on the page.

[lizzie]

For what it's worth, I've had pages with up to 30 words in
the title listed well (top ten) in A.V.

[Brett_Tabke]

Well, under normal circumstances, 78 is the current limit. I've been curious about this, and under 12000kw's, I can find about 30 titles that are longer than 78chars - most of those are like the one mentioned above. Description and url are different stories of course.

[seth_wilde]

"I assume the page doesn't have a title"

It looks like this title has changed since it was indexed. The current title is really long but starts out "Internet Solutions Company [phone] isc internet solutios company Internet Solutions Company" further on in the title it goes to non recogizable characters "дизайн страниц вэб дизайн веб дизайн студия web дизайна flash design web дизайн" and keeps going and going with pretty much repeating.

Do you think that when Av orginally indexed this page the funny characters were at the front of the title and Av just changed them to the dots?

[Brett_Tabke]

Here are some other ones to look at. Use the 50results per page option. Most all appear to be unicode or non-english pages.

word, rank, title length
knife 21 92,
leads 21 122,
lexmark 8 113,
lines 12 128,
medievil 1 103,
mega 1 122,
memorial 48 131,
minister 10 99,
mint 7 132,
moto 1 82,
motorcycles 36 101,
mpeg 32 137,
museums 2 98,
nat 49 83,
netbus 38 87,
networks 34 96,
newspaper 47 117,
nice 7 104,
nua 6 92,
offering 8 104,
offical 35 109,
webhosting 36 129,
yellow 6 91,

quick followup, most of the above are on .ru domains.

[engine]

Definate Brett, seems variable. Not sure how this has come about.
Not sure how best to use this to advantage. Many of the returns have short titles as a default. Longer titles on some pages are still cut off.

[seth_wilde]

I was kinda thinking that maybe there is a foreign AV that has different indexing requirements, and the sites that it's indexing are being added to the main database.

The question is.......Is their an advantage to having a longer title?

[metaman]

Could it be that Alta is looking at the contents of the title and not counting stop words? Just a thought..

[Brett_Tabke]

There are stop words in with the 78char title requirement. I think it is just unicode translations that are doing it. I haven't found one that is full english text yet. I've been trying to find more that are ranked one or 2, but that first one under "98" (which is actually a killer keyword), is the only one I've found.

[uksitesubmit]

I think it is 78 characters for title and 146/147 for description (including spaces)but this depends on how long the url is.
These funny characters are usually from foreign sites but a some of seo use them for cloaking...for keyword density purposes which i am entirely against!