Totally confused by titles being too long!

[Longsphoto]

We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past.  In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins.

Do I need to go through and change all those titles?  How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long?  Some are too long only in the archive link...

So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts!  Thanks y'all!

[danatanseo]

Chances are your Titles were being automatically constructed using the Titles of your posts. Yes, you will probably have to go back through and do proper titles for each one so that they don't exceed character lengths in Google and other search engines, but, take heart, it will be worth it. Right now the search engines are either making up their own titles or using truncated versions of your longer titles.

Take the time, go through and write really great titles for those 2,000 posts. It'll benefit you SEO. Don't worry, 2,000 titles really isn't and insurmountable task. You don't need to rework every page, just add titles of the proper length using a plug-in like Yoast. If you do ten a day you can have it done in a month.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

[Longsphoto]

Dana, it definitely helps!  The bigger problem is that with the plug-ins, I can't exactly tell what is too long.  Is it the link for the page or what Wordpress considers the title line?

[BlueprintMarketing]

I want to say Dana is right Yoast will wright the title in a search engine friendly manner

Thomas

[Niamh2]

I have a similar problem but just a mere 500 extra long links. I have whittled 1,148 broken links down to 22 and aiming for zero.

With the titles too long do I need to worry where I have linked out to other sites in a post that that might create new broken links or are there other things I should consider?

I always understood that I could fill that title bar and there would not be a problem. On examining the offending links I see that as the domain name has 32 characters from the first www to the m in .com which when prefaced with http:// and the title in the tilte bar creats a huge url. (I know the domain length is pushing it and know about the number of characters for Adwords)

So I just change the title in Yoast and don't bother about the title at the top of the page and the prermalink that was originally created?

I will do whatever it takes to clear up the problems but would like to sort the title links in one hit as I go through page by page.

Your advice would be appreciated.