{"id":1832,"date":"2012-08-29T16:00:13","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T16:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/2012\/08\/29\/how-to-check-your-title-tags-wont-get-cut-off-in-google-serps\/"},"modified":"2025-03-05T15:10:28","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T15:10:28","slug":"how-to-check-your-title-tags-wont-get-cut-off-in-google-serps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/2012\/08\/29\/how-to-check-your-title-tags-wont-get-cut-off-in-google-serps\/","title":{"rendered":"How to check your title tags won’t get cut off in Google SERPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

In years gone by, it was pretty easy to work out whether your title tag would display in full on Google\u2019s results pages \u2013 keep it between 65 and 70 characters and you should be fine. Then Google decided it would start messing around with how it displays titles and it became very difficult to predict whether your title would fit on its results pages without being cut off with a \u201c…\u201d.<\/p>\n

As recently as February \u201912, Search Engine Land published their \u201c9 Best Practices For Optimized “title” Tags\u201d<\/a> which advised keeping your titles to 70 characters or less. This was followed a few months later by a post from SEOmofo demonstrating that title tags are now limited by pixel width<\/a> rather than characters, meaning that if you use wide characters such as \u201cW\u201d and \u201cH\u201d then Google will display fewer characters than if you were to use thinner characters such as \u201ci\u201d and \u201cl\u201d \u2013 in fact they managed to get a 107 character title tag to display in full!<\/p>\n

\"title<\/p>\n

A week or so ago, whilst helping out our intern with a project he\u2019d been working on and playing around with various homepage title tags, we decided to try out Firebug so we could see how each of our suggestions may look in the search results… In doing this, we stumbled upon the revelation (to us at least!) that if you amend the Google SERPs page code with Firebug, it retains Google\u2019s restrictions on title length.<\/p>\n

Whether or not you are fussed about having your page title displayed in full tends to be down to the individual – some are very strict and others are less concerned with having Google cut them short and instead prefer to include more keywords in their title. If you’re one of the former, hopefully this should help you craft your titles.\n<\/p>\n

A Working Example<\/h2>\n

To demonstrate how you can use this feature, we\u2019ve used the Coast Digital Blog with a search for \u201ccoast digital blog\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"Coast<\/p>\n

Say we wanted to try out a new title tag:<\/p>\n

Online Marketing Blog | SEO, PPC, Affiliate & Email Marketing<\/a> Blog | Coast (76 chars)<\/p>\n

First you need to make sure you have Firebug installed on your browser \u2013 it\u2019s free and quick to install if you don\u2019t have it already.<\/p>\n

Once installed, right-click the title and click \u201cInspect Element with Firebug\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"Coast<\/p>\n

This will bring up the page code in the bottom half of your browser, with the title tag code highlighted as below:<\/p>\n

\"Code\"<\/p>\n

Click on the \u201c+\u201d sign to the left of the highlighted area to bring down the text contained within this area \u2013 you will find the keywords that Google has bolded within and <\/em> brackets.<\/p>\n

\"Code\"<\/p>\n

Now you can simply replace the text with your desired title tag text and it will display on the page, so if we now insert our new title:<\/p>\n

\"Listed<\/p>\n

Too long! Let\u2019s remove the \u201c| Coast\u201d part from the end:<\/p>\n

\"Listed<\/p>\n

Then if you want to double check that your title will still display in full when Google bolds out your keywords, just wrap and <\/em> round the appropriate words. Let\u2019s see what it displays if someone searches for \u201conline marketing blog\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"Listed<\/p>\n

Unfortunately this doesn\u2019t appear to work for meta descriptions, but hopefully you\u2019ll find this useful when writing title tags!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In years gone by, it was pretty easy to work out whether your title tag would display in full on Google\u2019s results pages \u2013 keep it between 65 and 70…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"related_service":[63,44],"related_industry":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"card":"

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\n Blog <\/p>\n \n

\n How to check your title tags won’t get cut off in Google SERPs\n <\/h2>\n <\/a> <\/div>\n
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\n In years gone by, it was pretty easy to work out whether your title tag would display in full on Google\u2019s results pages \u2013 keep it between 65 and 70… <\/div>\n
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\n 29 August 2012 <\/p>\n

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\n Search Marketing <\/div>\n
\n SEO <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/article>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"related_service","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/related_service?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"related_industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.elixirrdigital.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/related_industry?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}