New Google SERPs page title lengths, 60 characters?

[Adam_SEO_Learning]

It seems that the new Google SERPs have a shorter page title character length?

From what I can gather they are 60 characters in length.

Does this mean we all need to now optimise our page titles to 60 characters?

Has anyone else noticed this and made any changes to page title lengths?

[danwebman]

Using the Moz tools I check if page titles are too long, also my bespoke CMS checks the Page Title Length to 65.

Where does the 60 come from?

[Adam_SEO_Learning]

The new Google SERPs have only been showing since yesterday where I am (Cheshire, UK) and no MOZ crawls seem to have been ran since then.

I got 60 characters from looking at current page titles I am using. Some that are over 60 run off the title of the search result and show as ...

Others that are 60 characters and below show fine.

In this MOZ article - _http://moz.com/blog/googles-2014-redesign-before-and-after_ - it states "The new fonts do expand the titles significantly", could this be why I am seeing titles too long in the search results?

It seems to be across a number of sites on my result pages for various searches.

[SoleGraphics]

Google is always running tests in their SERPs. This is one of their tests and being to quick to follow might not be the appropriate step. I for one will wait for the dust to settle before tweaking anything.

Because the title lengths have changed there must be more happening within their search algo as well so just changing a title might not be helpfully.

[Adam_SEO_Learning]

Jon Wiley (Lead designer at Google Search) announced the changes are here to stay on a recent Google+ post - https://plus.google.com/+JonWiley/posts/AuUAQCWJpki

I will keep my ear to the ground and see what seems to be best practice with the page titles going forward

[Dr-Pete]

If you haven't yet, please see my follow-up post:

http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

This is a moving target, and it's actually a pixel width (512px), but I tried to take a data-driven approach, and as best I can measure, 55 characters is a safe limit about 95% of the time.

I will add that Google definitely processes characters beyond that limit (some are even in the source code) and words beyond that limit could count toward ranking. They won't count much, I strongly suspect, but this new limit doesn't mean you automatically have to cut everything shorter. There's certainly no penalty for going over, as long as you're not keyword-stuffing to extremes.

One down side is that the new method (using CSS for the cut-off) means that Google now cuts mid-word, instead of between words. This could be more detrimental to CTR, in my opinion. It's very situational, though. The best I can say is to look at your most important title tags in the context of real searches and make your own judgment call.