A recent post by a well known UK based SEO ‘guru’ provided a critique on Katie Price’s new baby clothing store, a comment of which was that the title tag was over 85 characters and as a result wouldn’t be ‘counted’ by Google.
In my experience this isn’t so although I believe it to be a common misconception and popular rumor that this is the case, so I set about looking for some published research and practical explorations before I set about validating it for myself.
The following 2 posts smash the 85 character rule and show that although Google prioritizes the earlier keywords in a Title Tag and clips the SERPS display at 85 characters it does use information over this mount for SERPS keyword usage.
Check them out for yourself and be enlightened:
hugoguzman.com/2010/05/dont-believe-the-hype-google-does-fully-index-long-title-tags
seomofo.com/snippet-experiment.html
UPDATE
It seems that DaveN has gone back over his original statement and done some testing and now says that they’ve tested up to 213 characters and Google is indexing them without issues.
Thanks for the mention and the link. Glad you found my little experiment of value.
Yes like many people i dont trust any of the ‘gurus’ statements without validating it first and you certainly saved me loads of time lol.
Thanks dude.
I limited my title tags to no more than 70 character. Here 85 character concept is a new learning as well as the 85 character myth debunked is another new learning. I also agree that the keywords should be placed earlier in the Title tag. I have also started following Hugo :)