How to Fix “Pages Have Too Much Text Within The Title Tags”

An important part of SEO is crafting how your site appears in the search results. Search results have at minimum five different elements you can edit and the potential for several more.

• Your site’s favicon.
• Your site’s overall name.
• Your page’s URL.
• Your page’s meta title.
• Your page’s meta description.

Other elements might include the publication date, the number of pages of a publication (for PDF and doc results), star ratings, pricing information, and all sorts of additional Schema-powered metadata.

Optimizing all of this is very tricky because while you can specify the details for all of these, Google doesn’t always listen. If Google thinks a different element of your page fits the user’s query better, they’ll use that instead. You see this most often with metadata, but they will also truncate or strip elements of a title, add or not add Schema data depending on context, and more.

Still, we do our best to provide what we think users want and trust Google to change things for edge cases where their read is better than ours. There’s nothing wrong with that (and no way to avoid it), but we do what we can.

One way we marketers work to optimize our SERPs display is by using auditing tools. Big-name marketing platforms like Semrush have technical audits, which can give you information you can use to improve your site’s appearance in the SERPs.

To narrow things down, the Semrush audit examines the title tags of your site’s pages and will tell you if they’re acceptable or if the content of the title tag is too short or too long. Being too short is very rare since most sites will pull your H1 for the title tag if you don’t specify anything, so you almost have to try to get it wrong.

Going over the limit is much more common. So, what is the limit, and how can you fix the issue?

This is where things get tricky.

What’s the Limit on Title Tags?

Life would be easy if we could say something like, “You have up to 120 characters of space in your title tag; don’t exceed that count,” and call it a day. Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.

Generally speaking, there are three layers where there can be limits to your title tag.

The first layer is the limit in your HTML code. Or, rather, the lack of limit. In your website’s code, the <title> tag encloses everything you put in your title. Is there a limit to this? Interestingly, no. You could copy and paste an entire book into your HTML code and enclose it in title tags, and it would be a valid HTML code.

The second layer is the title’s display. In a web browser, the title appears in the tab or window title bar. This has a limit, but that limit is solely physical. An old-school computer with an 800×600 display resolution would have less space for a title than a more modern 4K display.

In the old days, Internet Explorer had a limit of up to 512 characters they would display. Modern browsers have no such limit. Technically speaking, with that whole book pasted into an HTML title, you could even use a script to make it scroll as a marquee. Of course, as the comments on the script say, this isn’t something you should actually do.

The third limit is Google’s display. Google only allots so much space for a search result, and they truncate anything that goes too long. This helps keep the SERPs valuable and uniform.

In a past discussion of this issue, I did a few casual Google searches and found a few examples of titles that Google either let ride or truncated.

Interestingly, Google’s cutoff can vary. Their own guidance tells you to aim for 50-60 characters, which is pretty short! But even then, Google can cut off a title much earlier. This is how I see three different titles in search results:

 

• Common Mistakes with Title and Heading Tags and How to …
• Title tag: the ultimate reference guide to make it work for you
• What is an SEO Title Tag? | Constant …

With these three, the first is 56 characters before truncation. The page is here, and the full title is a bit longer because it adds the author’s name and the site’s name (Medium), but if Google allowed just eight more characters, it would have the full basic title.

 

The second, from this page, is 65 characters long and not truncated. It’s above the generally recommended max, but it still works.

 

The third is here and is cut off after just 38 characters. Even without the truncation, it’s only one word longer, making it shorter than the others even then. Why is it cut off, then? I don’t know.

Overall, there’s a lot of nuance to how Google decides when to truncate a title, when to let the specified title slide, and when to alter it.

Google’s Title Display Space

How much space does Google give you? This is where things get tricky because Google doesn’t measure in a nice number of characters; they give you an allotment of horizontal space in pixels. Google’s titles are 600 pixels wide.

This translates to around 60 characters. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less, and it depends on the letters you use.

See, Google uses a variable-width font. With a variable-width or proportional font, different letters have different widths. IIIII and WWWWW take up a different amount of horizontal space. Everything would be easier if Google used a monospaced font and they took up the same space, but monospace fonts are generally seen as more retro, and Google didn’t want that aesthetic.

Semrush’s Title Space Report

Above, I said that Google’s amount of space is about 60 characters, but it depends on what letters you use. What does Semrush check, though, when they generate their report?

When you run a Semrush report, and they tell you that you have pages where the titles have too much text, it looks like this:

“X pages have too much text within the title tags.

 

About this issue: Most search engines truncate titles containing more than 75 characters. Incomplete and shortened titles look unappealing to users and won’t entice them to click on your page. How to fix: Try to rewrite your page titles to be 75 characters or less.”

So, Semrush decided that 75 characters was the limit. This is generous for Google, but it’s more in line with what search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo use.

Whether you go for 60 or 75 characters, it doesn’t hugely matter. I’ve seen Google truncate titles much shorter than the limit, and I’ve seen them let longer ones through. The best you can do is try your best, as circular as that is.

What Happens if Your Title is Too Long

Semrush says that users don’t like page titles that are too long and that they get fewer clicks. I’m not entirely convinced that’s true because it’s so common that it doesn’t really even stand out. A lot of times, I just assume a truncated title was cutting off a brand name or a word or two that wasn’t meaningful. I also haven’t seen tangible hits to my ranking when my titles are a little on the long side (for example, this page is truncated but still ranks well).

If your title is too long, will you lose traffic? Probably not, though it’s possible you might lose some if the part that ends up truncated was valuable. You can avoid that by front-loading the value in your titles.

The truth is that Google rewrites titles all the time, and some studies found that anywhere from 40% to 80% of titles are rewritten in at least one minor way.

So, if you have pages where the title is too long, what can you do? There are a few options.

Option 1 is to ignore it and let Google do its thing. Maybe they truncate your brand name or remove a filler word. Does that make your title worse? Of course not. In fact, if you notice that Google has rewritten your title, it might be a good idea to actually edit your title to what Google displays. They do tend to know better what users are clicking, after all.

Option 2 is to work on compression. You can do a lot of micro-optimizations to shorten a title without losing meaning. Things like:

• Replace “and” with “&.”
• Replace words with numbers, like “twelve” with “12.”
• Use commonly-known acronyms, like “CA” instead of “California.”
• Remove extraneous branding like a “– Topicfinder” since you already have a lot of branding in a search result.

Depending on your topic and titles, you might be able to save a lot of space doing this.

Option 3 is to fully rewrite your title. There are a lot of ways you can say the same thing in fewer words, and make it punchier besides. An example from another discussion is changing:

• The Ultimate Guide to Planning a Budget-Friendly Family Vacation: Tips for Choosing Destinations, Activities, Accommodation, and More

To something shorter, like:

• Budget-Friendly Family Vacation Planning: Tips & Tricks

When you consider the first is likely to be truncated at the colon anyway, it’s clear which one is more valuable.

Using the Semrush Report and Fixing Your Titles

Now that I have the theory out of the way, let’s get into the practice.

When you run a Semrush site audit, you will receive a lengthy report with all of the issues they find. The PDF I linked is an example of one of their reports.

First, you might notice that the too-long title tags issue is a notice, not a warning or an error. That means it should be fairly low on the priority list of things you need to fix. It’s relatively low-impact compared to these other issues, so make sure to fix the more relevant problems before worrying about title tag length.

Once you’ve fixed those other issues and you’re down to title tag length, you need to identify which pages have too-long title tags. Semrush uses 75 characters as a limit, but as we know, that’s not actually accurate. I recommend using a crawler like Greenflare or Screaming Frog to pull a full report of your site and identify any page that has lengthy titles.

One trick you can use is exporting title data to a spreadsheet program. Set the column for page titles to be the same font/size/style as Google’s search results (20pt Arial, last I checked) and then set the width of the column to be the number of pixels Google displays, 600. Anything that goes too long that it’s not in the bounds of the column, you can edit.

From there, it’s just a matter of editing your titles. I recommend Content Powered’s SERP Visualizer tool, which you can find by searching it up; it lets you try out different titles and see whether or not Google will likely truncate them and where. Play around with it, find better titles, and make edits to your pages.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Finally, don’t get too concerned if you notice that Google is still rewriting your titles occasionally. As I said, they will rewrite them to suit the user’s intent in queries if they think a title variation will do better than your title. Ideally, this gets you more traffic rather than less, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

If you have any questions about anything I discussed in this article, please feel free to leave me a comment down below! I’d be more than happy to answer all of your questions as best I can. And if you’re looking for any additional information, be sure to check out my other blog posts! There is a vast amount of information available to you in my articles, and they’re entirely free! If I haven’t written about a specific topic you’re looking for, be sure to let me know! I’ll gladly look into it. 

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