One SEO professional was concerned about their page title length. They are publishing approximately 20 articles per day.
As they were optimizing for Search Engines, they explained to those in charge that the page titles must be limited to 65 characters. Those in charge were very upset.
In their opinion, they believed news should have a longer title, and a good title.
The SEO pro explained that after struggling with them, they searched the web and could not find a conclusive answer to this issue.
Their main question is: is page title length a ranking factor, and how long should the page title be?
John explained that no, Google has no recommendation for page title length. His recommendation is to identify how much space you have from your side, and work with this in terms of page title optimization. This is a valid approach.
Google, however, doesn’t care about page title length in terms of page ranking. This is more of a user experience thing.
This happens at approximately the 02:57 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 2 2:57
I have actually three short questions. I work in the news industry. So we are publishing like 20 articles each day. So I, when I was optimizing the SEO, I told them, we need to fix the title to 65 letters only. And they were very, like, upset about it. Because news should be like a long title and a good title. So after struggling with them, I searched the web, and I didn’t get a really good answer. Is that a really good factor of ranking, that the title length should be like something with the limitation?
John 3:42
No. We don’t have any recommendation for the length of a title. So I think, kind of picking a number from your side and saying, on mobile, like this much room is available. So as an editorial guideline, we’ll say 65, or whatever you want to choose. That’s perfectly fine. But from Google, from the search quality, the ranking side, we don’t have any guideline that says it should be this long, or…
SEO Professional 2 4:12
Even if the whole title doesn’t show up in the search page?
John 4:19
That sounds like something different. How do you mean?
SEO Professional 2 4:21
I mean, when I search on Google for something, and our website is shown, if the title is longer than 65 letters, it will not show all of them on the search page. So is that like a ranking factor? That’s my question.
John 4:38
No, no, the length doesn’t matter. If we show something shorter or if we show something slightly different, that’s just kind of how we display it in the search results. It doesn’t mean the ranking changes.
