Title Element length too long?

[RyanKent]

My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it.

Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example.

A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be:

Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums

The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better.

The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long"

So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?

[Francisco_Meza]

Using "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" many times over and over again may seem a little spammy. If 100% of your threads/titles have "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums", I think you may run into problems. I saw a video 2 weeks ago of Matt Cutts talking about that. I thing it on YouTube under GoogleWebmasterHelp. I know you are not intentionally trying to spam, but 1000 if you have 1000 of those, I don't think anyone can argue it.

[AlanBleiweiss]

The key issue you wrote about, titles that are too long, relates to how well a page matches the topical focus within the title.

Too many words in a title can cause topical dilution if they're all keyword phrases.

In my experience, have the most important / most relevant content at the front of the title relative to the page topic.  So from that regard you're doing it properly. Generally speaking, I teach clients to keep the individual page title to 70 characters.  Not to prevent dilution specifically, but to ensure the entire title shows up in the Google search results although Google sometimes overrides your given title for one of their own if they think your title doesn't truly match the page focus.

When a title goes beyond 70 characters, if the extra text is brand focused, it's not a terrible thing.  Google will still process the entire title, it's just the whole thing won't show up in the results pages.

Having all the titles appended after the unique forum topic with your forum brand is not 100% ideal in regard to matching the individual page topic, however it's perfectly acceptable from an overall branding perspective.

As for MagentoWebDeveloper and his concern with repetition, there is truth to that, to a certain degree, however it's not as major an impact because you do have each title prepended with the individual page's topical focus.

And the more you do to focus on across-the-board SEO, the less concern that becomes.