Anyone using Yahoo Small Business? Not sure if SEOmoz works with YahooSB

[Wales]

I am not sure if SEOmoz is compatible with Yahoo Small Business.   The crawl states that the title page is too long for over a hundred titles, but they are not.  SEOmoz is taking the title page and the parent or catagory page and grouping together.

Please only respond if you work SEO for Yahoo Small Business accounts.  Would be glad to take discussion thread off line or show the SEOmoz report.

[JoelDay]

Hey Mike,

I took a look at your campaign and the pages that are getting flagged as having too long of a title and they are all accurate.

Without citing examples (for your privacy), if you actually pull up the pages mentioned and view the source of them, you'll find that the the title tags are actually as long as mentioned in the web app.

It may be that YahooSB is creating these title tags and inserting them into your page.

I hope that clears up those warnings for you.
Cheers,
Joel.

[Wales]

I found the problem.  It is in the way an old template functions adding the section to the product and thus making them too long.  It is not an SEOmoz or Yahoo issue it's in my template.

I have one question.   While researching this I talked to two SEO "experts" who stated while the titles are too long to be indexed.  The spiders still look at the first 70 characters and just do not look at the rest.   What is your opinion?  Do you think this hurts ranking or I should just be aware if there are key words past 70 characters it will not be read.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Mike

It's not so much a case of the titles not 'being indexed' or read but more to do with how they display in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

If your page is long, then the title is going to be cut off. Also, the general goal is to have your keywords at the beginning of the title to get the most bang for your buck.

Specifics depend on the site but it is nice to have the page title like the title of a book and consider your site as the author. Have it short, punchy but descriptive and also state the author so:

Small Business SEO Packages | BowlerHat.co.uk

is better than

Do better in the search engines with small business SEO packag..

Your title has one job to do:

describe the page in a way that search engines and users can understand. So, if the description of the page is done by Yahoo in a sub optimal way then yeah, it will hurt your ranking and it will negatively affect the amount of people that click on the link when it is displayed.

Lose - Lose | YourSite.co.uk

Hope that helps!
Marcus