A title tag that is too long risks being truncated in the search engine results and cut off with ellipses or worse, rewritten altogether.

If your page title is too long, you can update it to reduce the character count. Read on to learn how. 

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Long Title Tags Can Be Truncated

Google typically only displays the first 600 pixels of a page title. This is roughly equivalent to 60 characters. If your title is too long, it could be cut off in the SERPs or completely rewritten.

In SEO, it’s best to retain as much control over your organic search program as possible. This includes having the title tag that you wrote display as you intended to in the results.

How to Shorten a Title Tag

Some CMS’s allow you to update title tags directly. This approach would be done on a page-by-page basis.

If you can’t make the update directly, or don’t have access to do so, you can bring in the dev team for assistance. They should be able to make the appropriate changes directly to the site’s code to rewrite the too-long title tag. 

As for writing the new title tag, try to remove unnecessary words or punctuation or rewrite it to contain well-formed, page-relevant, descriptive text that is under 60 characters in length.

Recommended Reading: How to Write Optimized Page Title Tags for SEO 

Updating Title Tags at Scale

Title tags can be updated at scale across thousands of pages with SEO execution platform ClarityAutomate. This way, a few clicks is all it takes to implement the site change to resolve this issue.

1. Select what you'd like to optimize: Title

To begin, select “Title” in ClarityAutomate.

2. Choose how you'd like to optimize it: Replace

This fix required making an update, as opposed to an addition or deletion. The old title tag will be replaced with a new, shorter one.

3. New Title: The text for the title

Lastly, enter the new text that will be the title tag.

Before and After

In just a few minutes, you can deploy on-page changes to resolve various issues with ClarityAutomate.  


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