If and when your title tag gets too long, what are the implications and exactly what you need to do?
Well, this is what we are going to see! In this particular scenario, Google is apparently trying to algorithmically decide a better title for the post instead of truncating it and inserting an ellipsis to the end the manner in which they used to.
But how could a string of loosely arranged words that have been separated by dashes and simply pulled from the URL act as a better title than the actual one – even a shortened form of the actual title? Even pixel width of your title tags does matter a great deal.
Option for a custom title tag
Many blogging platforms usually include an option of inserting a custom title tag. And if no custom tag is generated, the title tag is created from the post’s itself. And if you have got some truly long titles of posts, many of them sans custom, shorter title, what it means is that the post authors are inadvertently relying on Google for truncating as and when needed. The focus is more on a great headline.It seems like a short, search-friendly title tag has become more important – without it, the search engine giant could simply replace your title with almost anything, even including part of the URL. This is something that won’t exactly lead to the ideal user experience SEO experts want. A replaced title tag is, in a way, a lost opportunity for encouraging searchers to click.
How long title tags should be?
So, how long title tags should and can be, and still be shown in the SERPs. To put it simply, the proven norm of ‘not more than 70 characters’ is not any longer as hard-and-fast as it previously used to be.
The experiments in this regard show Google is now truncating title tags on basis of not only the number of characters, but also on your title tag’s pixel width. So title tags that are rich in wide letters such as A and W won’t probably be able to fit in as many characters in before they get truncated in comparison to title tags carrying more narrow letters such as I and T.
It is open to experiment to figure out where the limit exactly is on title length/width. But make sure at least, your pages having long headlines carry shorter (and still keyword-rich) titles in title tags. Watch out for your usage of wide characters..