My Title is Too Long for Google Snippet – What Now?

The way your site looks on a Google search results page is quite possibly one of the most important parts of SEO. Yes, your content is important, as are your metadata and schema and pagespeed, but none of it matters if no one looks at your search result and thinks, “Yes, I’ll click this one.”

If your page’s title is too long for a Google search snippet, what should you do?

Let’s talk about it.

How Much Space Do You Have?

First, I want to talk about how much space you actually have, because Google makes it unnecessarily complicated.

Google decided at some point that they wanted a certain amount of space for titles and that they would cut off anything that went too long. Normally, you might think, “Alright, so how many letters long is it?” After all, text is usually easily measured in letters or characters.

The trouble is that Google uses a variable-width font. Forgive the digression; I’m going to get into a little bit of detail on how fonts work.

Consider two letters: W and I. They’re clearly very different widths. When you put five of them in a row, you can see the space they take up compounds.

• WWWWW
• IIIII

This is because many fonts – including the font I use here on Topicfinder and the font Google uses for their search results – are non-monospaced. A monospaced font fixes this by allotting the same amount of space horizontally for each letter. Courier is a common monospaced font and looks more like this:

• WWWWW
• IIIII

You can see that it widens the I and scrunches the W, and the end result is a fixed grid where each letter and character, no matter what it is, takes up the same amount of horizontal space.

Monospaced fonts are often viewed as “retro” fonts because they come from the days of the printing press, where letter tiles were the same size, and from old-school console interfaces, which used them for clarity on low-resolution screens. Google didn’t want that retro look, and they have swapped through various fonts, including options like Arial and their own custom-designed Google Sans. Even when they change fonts, it’s still a non-monospaced font.

Why does all of this matter?

Google wants the search results to take up a certain amount of space horizontally on the screen. But since they use a non-monospaced font, they can’t just say, “Well, it’s 60 characters long.” That would leave a ton of variation in the width of titles depending on what letters you use.

Instead, Google has decided to pick a pixel dimension for their width. That width is 600 pixels, which averages about 60 characters but can vary depending on the letters, words, and symbols you use.

What Happens if Your Title is Too Long?

If your page title, as specified by your meta title tag, is longer than the space Google gives it, what happens?

There are three possibilities.

Number one is that Google lets it ride and truncates it. You see this a lot with sites where the title doesn’t matter, like Quora.

For example, this page has the on-site title of:

• What will happen if the title tag is too long on the Google search result? – Quora

In the SERPS, it looks like this:

• What will happen if the title tag is too long on the Google …

Google simply cuts it off and replaces the last chunk with “…” so it doesn’t take up more space than it’s allowed to. This is a pretty common result, especially if the words getting cut off are brand name tags and other less important words.

Number two is related; Google will sometimes lightly edit a title to remove things like the brand name. For example, if that Quora title was a little bit shorter and the only bit that was too long was the “- Quora” bit, they might just cut that off and leave the title as-is without the ellipsis.

Number three is just that they rewrite your title entirely.

Wait, what?

Enter Titlegate

“Titlegate” is the name given to the outrage that happens whenever people realize that Google doesn’t really care about your metadata.

A while back, I did a small-scale study looking at meta-descriptions for pages. Since this is one of the three pieces of information you can specify that show up in Google’s search results, we marketers tend to think of it as very important to get right.

The trouble is that only about 17% of the queries and results I tested used the default meta description. Some pages don’t even specify meta descriptions, and most of the ones that do have it ignored in favor of some chunk of text on the page.

In the case of meta descriptions, Google looks at the content of a page and the subject of a query and tries to pull a couple of sentences from the page that are more relevant to the query than the general information a marketer wrote in the meta tags. It’s all very customized; the same page showing up for different queries can have different descriptions, depending on what Google thinks is most important at the time.

As it turns out, the same thing happens with titles. It’s also extremely variable. Google has tested, changed, rolled back, and iterated on their ideas of what titles should be. A study from 2021 showed a lot of rewriting happening in ways that, frankly, sucked. Later studies from 2022 found anywhere from 40% to 80% of titles are rewritten, depending on what you consider a rewrite. The higher number came from, for example, changing [] to () but not tangibly changing the title, whereas the lower number ignored those minor changes.

Note: Google does have some logic behind how they rewrite titles. Most of the time, if they’re rewriting, it’s something minor, a way to fill out an extremely short or missing title, a way to update a title to reflect changes to the page, or to clarify titles that are otherwise identical to one another. They aren’t usually rewriting a title without a good reason. It’s only a scandal when, as in 2021, their algorithm got a lot of things wrong.

All of this is to say that if your title is too long, Google has absolutely zero qualms about just picking a new one for you, especially if they think it will be more relevant to a query than what you actually specified.

How to Deal with a Too-Long Title

Alright, let’s say that you’ve come up with a great topic for a blog post, probably because you’re using Topicfinder to do your topic ideation for you. The trouble is, if you want to make it descriptive enough to stand out, it ends up being a bit too long. What can you do about it? There are a few options, so let’s talk about them.

Option 1: Let Google Do Their Thing

The first option is to just not worry about it. If Google is going to rewrite titles at their own whim, why bother spending that much effort on it?

Personally, I don’t recommend this option, just like I didn’t recommend ignoring meta-descriptions in my case study.

The fact is, even if Google rewrites titles a lot of the time, they don’t do it all the time. And, if you have a bad title, you have less of a chance of ranking in the first place. Google hates when you ignore elements of SEO almost as much as they hate if you’re doing things for them instead of for your users.

In my view, there’s no reason not to focus on writing a good title that fits in the snippet. If Google changes it, there’s nothing you can do about that. If they don’t, though, you want your best foot forward.

Option 2: Remove Extraneous Characters to Shorten the Title

The second option is to refine your title down into something a little more compact.

For example, a few kinds of changes you can look for:

• Remove a leading A, such as “A Guide to Finding the Best Product” could just be “Guide to Finding the Best Product”.
• Compress the and. Instead of “Review and Buyer’s Guide,” use “Review & Buyer’s Guide”.
• Further compress with a slash. “Review/Buyer’s Guide”.
• Use numbers. Instead of “The Top Ten Products,” use “The Top 10 Products”.
• Use common acronyms. FL instead of Florida, that kind of thing.
• Remove brand tagging. I find that having your brand name in the title is helpful if a brand/product match is important to you, but less so for more informational content pages like blog posts. The only downside is it’s usually a site-wide setting so you have to pay more attention if you want it at post level.

You can also do things like replace certain words with emojis, though I recommend caution with this. Unlike simple word choice and compression, emojis have connotations and reflect on your brand in a particular way. Anecdotally, I don’t see them super often in casual searches, so YMMV.

These strategies work best when you’re only a few dozen pixels or a couple of characters over the limit. They can help you take an existing title and shorten it by 2-5% to put it just within the Google limits.

Option 3: Rewrite the Title to be Shorter

Of course, the final option is to fully rewrite the title to fit. Sometimes, there’s no real leeway to compress a title to fit.

One thing to consider here is whether or not you want your H1 and your meta title to match. Google usually pulls your meta title, but they can freely choose to use your H1 if they want. I’ve seen a lot of blogs split test titles this way. You can write a full-length title for your H1 where there’s no character limit and a shorter version for the meta display. As long as they match well enough, Google probably won’t have an objection.

Tips for the Perfect Blog Post Title

To round things out, let’s talk about a few of the top tips I have for writing top-tier titles.

Focus more on a single relevant keyword.

I find that the biggest mistake people make is trying to include two or three keywords in their titles. You really only have space for one good one. In fact, if you’re trying to squeeze more in, there’s a decent chance that Google will view it as keyword stuffing and will either rewrite your title or just rank you lower. Pick one focus keyword for your title, 2-3 for your meta description, and use the rest throughout your content.

Don’t overshoot and end up with a super short title.

There are a few reasons to have a short page title, but none of them are relevant to content marketing. Blog posts especially need longer titles to be descriptive and attractive to searchers. Having a page title that’s too short is actually one of the main reasons Google rewrites your titles, too.

Use a Google snippet simulator to customize your title.

There are a bunch of marketing companies that have put together search snippet preview visualizers you can use.

Don’t just guess how long your title will be; double-check if you’re worried. You’ll get a feel for length over time, but it’s still worth checking when your post titles run a little longer.

Stick to parentheses and hyphens as separators.

Google likes to rewrite titles that use non-standard separators like bars (|), brackets ([]), and odd symbols. Unless you have a good reason for a symbol to appear, like using the section symbols (§) for legal documentation, it’s probably better to leave them out.

Finally, of course, use Topicfinder. I can’t guarantee every title it generates for you will be perfect, but they put you 90% of the way there, so you can spend the rest of your effort on more tangible improvements and, of course, the content you create.

Leave a Comment