Titles being too long

[SeobyKP]

I am in process of trying to help a client (who I also am an associate for) and they have over 600 pages (which are images) that have the same info in their tag, missing description, and you are talking 1500-2k pixels in their title.

I called the host and the owner of the host said "If you were a real seo you would know that the title length doesn't matter." .... help me out here.

[Dr-Pete]

From a product perspective, we tend to need to set guidelines that can be quantified, but I'm afraid the whole truth is never quite that black-and-white. All else being equal, I think keeping your titles to a reasonable length is beneficial. Long titles don't automatically harm you (there's no Capital-P penalty for it), but they tend to create a few problems:

(1) Often, long, CMS-generated titles front-load repetitive words (like the site name or category/sub-category), which devalues the unique/important words in Google's eyes and is more likely to make it look like duplicate content.

(2) Long titles tend to devalue important words for search visitors as well, which can harm click-through rates. I'm a firm believer that CTR has indirect impact on ranking over time. Even if it had no SEO significance, it's generally bad for engagement and for your site.

That said, it depends a lot on what you're dealing with. If a title of a page is, say, a title of a blog post, and it's just a long title, that's probably fine. If you have 5,000 product pages that all start with "Bob's Discount Propane Warehouse | Propane and Propane Accessories | ...", then that's going to be detrimental to your usability and SEO.

You mentioned images in your reply to Christy -- could you give a couple of examples of the types of pages and titles you're talking about? In general, image-only pages with no additional content (especially if they have near-duplicate titles) are going to be low-value from a search perspective.

[SeobyKP]

How he acted kinda made me second guess what I have known all of this time.

SO... With over 600 pages of images where you can not put additional content/wording on each of those pages and each of those pages have long titles, would you guys recommend removing those images from becoming their own pages (since you can't add additional content) and just put them together in different slideshows or tables?

And is it still true that long titles (over 35 or 570 pixels) are not advisable?

[Christy-Correll]

Hi SeobyKP, that sounds really frustrating! Ugh, so sorry you are dealing with that. Now, what exactly can we help you with? That is, what specific question would you like us to address in this thread?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Christy

[WebMarkets]

HA! doesnt matter huh...

download SEO Quake as a chrome extension. Its great stuff. It will grade every page in detail, showing you how long titles and descriptions should be, as well as other metrics. big fan.