Moz says "Title Too Long", Yoast says title is the perfect length. Who's right?

[TeamViviRealEstate]

For a bunch of my pages, the MOZ Crawl Report says "Title Too Long". Yoast on my site tells me that the titles are the correct length. How can these two things be at odds with each other? Which one is right?

[WebElaine]

Like anything in SEO, there isn't an exact answer. It's partly because Google shows titles of different lengths depending on what size screen it's showing on. It's also because characters can be different pixel widths. For example, an "i" is not very wide, while a capital "M" or "W" is a wider character, just by the nature of the letter itself.

Yoast openly states that the optimal title length depends on what kind of result is going to be shown, so their advice is to make sure your keyphrase is within the first half of your title and not stress about exact character count or pixel width.

Moz keeps a close eye on this as well, and their research concludes that approximately 50 to 60 characters, or 600 pixels, is the optimal length, and it will show on about 90% of search results. Moz Pro reports that anything over 570 pixels is too large, though, so if you're under their 600px recommendation you can still get the warning that your titles are too long.

All things considered, as long as you're not grossly outside of either target - 60 characters or 600 pixels - I'd take it with a grain of salt and consider just marking "ignore" on the titles that are close to tolerance. There are no hard and fast rules - except the rule that Google will continue to change - and we may see shorter or longer limits in the future. Tweaking your titles to exactly within both tools' tolerance is probably not going to get you the best return for your time - see what other more high-priority issues you have, like 404 errors or missing meta descriptions. (Change case in point, Google just changed their meta description length maximum.)

[TeamViviRealEstate]

Thanks for your response. I really appreciate it!

[Crate47]

Am I right in thinking that having increased the acceptable length for meta descriptions Google have now reverted to the old length? Yoast is now saying that meta descriptions that were OK are now too long.