Title Tag length and UTF-8

[jkundrotas]

Hello seomozers!

Today I've come to one interesting question about Title Tag lenght in UTF-8 coded content. It's relevant to description tag lenght too.

So, as we all know SEO best practices recommend that my Title tag should be under 70 (or 75) characters. Now, we have a website which is UTF-8 coded. That means that our special characters (some lithuanian letters) at the end gains +4 or +5 characters in length. So Google Webmaster Tools in our case report that some Title Tags are longer than they should be (exceeded by those +4 or +5), but in SERPs we see clear and not trunctated Title Tags (which means that our title tags are displayed correctly in UTF-8).

The question is - should I believe in SERPs and don't take any action or maybe should I notice Google Webmaster Tools recommendations and shorten those tags ?

Well, I do believe that at the end it's not so important, but I'd like to hear some more opinions on this simple situation.

[Ben-HPB]

This is a tricky thing as we see the SERP Landscape change with Panda and other future updates. My rule of thumb has been to stay under the marker. When writing the Title and Description I see it going more of the direction of a Google Adwords Ad ...

Deliver a proposition to that customer just the same way you would in an Adwords Ad taking into consideration the landing page copy and bounce rate you see from that page. Fine Tune the Visitor Experience and it will return a gain in the future.

Hope this helps, this is just my 2 cents.