Q&A Page Titles

[Myles92]

Hello All!

I am currently updating page titles and metadata descriptions for a websites Q&A section and have run in to a problem while updating page titles.  Since it is the Q&A section of the website, all of the page titles are around 100 characters and some are up to 200 characters long.  Here is an example:

Page Title:  My child is working below grade level in math. Do I have to purchase the curriculum from the grade below as well?

The problem is that this is obviously too long for a SERP to display however I know it is best practice to have matching titles on both the title tag and page title.  My question is what hurts SEO value more:  the title tag and title of the page not matching or having a very long title displayed on the SERP?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I recommend you keep the title long as is and let google cut it based on the keywords searched. Editing those titles to a certain length and keep them making sense isn't scalable.

• long title tag = text gets cut off in serps, not worse for SEO but worse for CTR
• page heading and page title not matching won't hurt your SEO.