What should the title tag length be in 2024?
The title tag is one of the most important SEO elements. It can have a great impact on your rankings. In my experience, optimizing title tags can give rankings a strong boost.
There are many different ways to approach optimizing a title tag. One is making sure they fit within the 55-60-character limit (which I think is a bit outdated today). Other SEOs suggest it’s OK to have title tags up to 70 characters long.
There are also concerns that having the title truncated in search results or rewritten by Google can negatively affect organic performance and click-through rate.
In this article, we’ll explore the basis for such concerns, Google’s official statement about title length, and my findings after manually looking at 645 title tags of Google’s SERPs.
Example of title tag cut off in SERPsTechnically speaking, the number of characters for a title tag that Google can display in SERPs is measured in pixels. When your title tag is too long, Google can cut it off like this.
The title tag update and the aftermath
In August 2021, Google released an update aimed at title tags. This update enables Google to show a different title to users in SERPs than the one available in the HTML title tag.
HTML title tags may get rewritten in SERPs when they are:
- Too long.
- Stuffed with keywords.
- Missing or containing repetitive “boilerplate” language (i.e., home pages might be called “Home”).
Once the update was released, it caused an uproar in the SEO community as many SEOs have reported incidents where the title rewrite went “horribly wrong.”
Rob Woods reported an incident where the title tag was replaced with the URL slug:
shared this elsewhere. The query was "colored contacts" which appears in the title and H1. Instead of one of those, they are using the URL slug as the serp title. pic.twitter.com/eg9IVgCEyO
— Rob Woods