Title elements too long - good for SEO?

[DavidSpivac]

As I was reviewing a client's web pages I noticed that most of the pages have titles that exceed the 70 characters limit.

By looking in more details it seems that Google uses all keywords from this long titles. I wanted to reduce the titles under 70 characters but realised that I may cut some important keywords. By reducing to 70 characters, do you think I can damage the performance?.

[AlanMosley]

no, shorten them to 65, to fit all search engines
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-title-is-too-long

Having many keywords means your are diluting them,

the title Keyword gives all its credit to one keyword, but Keyword1 Keyword2 only gives half the credit to each.

Your parents can leave you all their money, but if you have a brother you will only get half.

[john4math]

Alan is right. Your question reminded me of this relevant WBF. Enjoy! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

[Dr-Pete]

There is some evidence that keywords beyond 65-70 are read by search engines, but practically speaking, Alan is absolutely right. Every keyword you add dilutes the power of other keywords, and trying to cram in extra keywords is almost never worth the trouble.

The only exception I'd make is if you have auto-generated titles - let's say product names, and those product names are by themselves over 65 characters on rare occasion (1 in 100 products). In that case, I wouldn't worry about it - you could leave a few of those alone without harm.

More often, though, people try to cram in "Product | Category | Sub-category | Brand" and it spins out of control. Shorter titles, focused on the unique keywords for that page, are going to be more effective in 95%+ of cases.

[DavidSpivac]

Thank you Peter.

I appreciate your useful feedback.