Page title getting cut off in SERPS even though it's under 70 characters?

[MichaelWeisbaum]

I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS.  It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name.  Does a "-" have anything to do with it?  Does that translate to an elipsis?

Format:

keywords - website/brand.com

Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?

[SuperlativB]

Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.

[SuperlativB]

Have you tried to exclude the "-" I have experienced brand being cut before but then I had the title under 70 characters + brand.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hmm, not entirely sure, can you provide a link?

I have seen something a little odd recently with page titles. We are working on our new site,  was going to use Joomla and the Zoo CCK but unbelievably, whilst they have a really cool blog system built into Zoo, you can't set page titles so all article titles are the same and it uses the blog title.

But, we are seeing google take the article titles from the H1 and create it's own title tags from these to return the page in the results with a good, clickable title.

Obviously, we are going to change this and go back to Wordpress as it's a dealbreaker not being able to set page titles but the behaviour we have seen from Google in this instance is interesting.

So, sorry, waffling, are your page titles exactly as  you have put them? Is it trying to add anything? Do you have any special characters or anything that is causing problems?

I have just  done a bit of a random google and I can see lots of page titles getting cut off at around 58 characters in where the page title is longer than that. Lots of other full titles seem to be coming in at around 62 so there must be a slightly earlier breaking point now. Doing a bit of googling it looks like you can get snipped at anything over 64 so I would just work on getting them a little shorter.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

[RyanKent]

If you can offer an exact keyword search and URL, we can probably offer a conclusive diagnosis.

A possibility is one or more of the characters is being converted to a character which cannot be displayed properly. This type of conversion requires multiple characters to represent the single character (i.e. replacing with %E1 so it takes 3 character spaces rather then 1).

[RyanKent]

I don't wish to side track this thread but I have worked with Zoo and to the best of my knowledge you can change the titles just fine.

Zoo > Blog > Items > Name is the article title

On the right side Config > Page Title is the field to control page title

If you have an example of what you feel can't be done, feel free to e-mail me: Ryan@Vitopian.com and I can take a better look.

[magicrob]

What keywords are you searching with? If you add the brand to the keywords does it show the full Title? Google may be truncating the title depending on your query.

Cheers

Rob

[Marcus_Miller]

I'll fire you an email buddy.

[MichaelWeisbaum]

I just checked and that's not the case, I wish it was though.  It gets cut-off at 54 characters!  Isn't that way too short???

[MichaelWeisbaum]

Unfortunately I can't give that information.  The only character I have in there is the "-" before the website name at the end.  I typically use pipes "|" but the dash was already implemented across the site.  Looking at some of my other clients now, it's starting to look like 70 characters is NOT the standard anymore.  I'm seeing consistent page title cut-offs under 60. Ugh.

[RyanKent]

As I shared above, it entirely depends on the title.

Without looking at the actual information involved it's kind of like describing a list of symptoms to a doctor. "I have a headache" could be nothing, could be a brain tumor. We need to see the "patient" i.e. the web page and keyword, in order to properly diagnose the issue. Otherwise we are guessing blindly.

[magicrob]

A few questions:

Can you work the brand into the keywords somehow?

Is it necessary to show the brand at the end of the title for Google users?

Do you use the brand in the meta description?

[RyanKent]

I am not able to confirm the issue you are describing. I have looked up multiple pages with titles of lengths between 65 - 70 characters and they appear completely in SERPs. I suspect the issue you are reporting is specific to a particular character in your URL. I understand you shared there are not any special characters, but there must be something unique about your URLs which cause this problem. Google fully supports longer titles then you are able to achieve.

Perhaps a compromise. Can you share the URL and search term used on one of these other pages which are being cut off under 60 characters?

[OptimizeSmart]

When did you make changes to the title tag? The new title tag will appear in the SERP only when the page is re-indexed by Google.