Does Google ACTUALLY ding you for having long Meta Titles? Or do studies just suggest a lower CTR?

[Bevelwise]

I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this?

Thank you!

[rjonesx. 0]

Great question, and I certainly heard the "will this hurt my seo" thing all the time as a consultant. A couple of thoughts...

• To my knowledge, there is no specific algorithmic feature that would lower a page's rank because of too long descriptions
• Long meta descriptions, however, may be truncated (as you pointed out) or ignored and replaced altogether by Google if they find a more appropriate subsection of text on the page.
• A succinct, well written meta description may help with CTR which itself may be a ranking factor
• Google has stated that they want you to write good meta descriptions, for what it is worth.

What I try and say to clients is "are you prepared to build a top 10 website in your industry". If they are sweating good meta descriptions, they aren't ready to compete in the big leagues.

[ClaytonJ]

I think meta descriptions are important.

They are your first chance to display a call to action to a customer and to get them to click through to your site.  Hence a poorly written one, truncated etc. is probably not as enticing as one within the 160 characters - that does not truncate.

We have acted for several clients where we have optimized the MD and improved the CTR by .08% (ie less than 1%) but that has amounted to over 20,000 additional clicks on their site a year.

Also I loved Rand's WBF which indirectly addresses the issue, but correlates with my view, though probably not as strong that dwell time is a significant factor on ranking.

https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday

On your questions directly:-

Will it hurt your SEO? - Yes, two possible reasons

1/ you keyword stuff it.

2/ no-one clicks through because you have a bad MD

On truncation - there are exceptions, but google generally does not if you fit within there pixel/character limit.

My view - draft and implement your MD's properly...

Hope that assists.