The one thing constant with Google is CHANGE. Title tags were showing 70 characters forever, but not any more! Google has gone aesthetic on us. They want to display the tag within a limited number of pixels now, so if your tag has a lot of wide horizontal letters like capital G’s or W’s, your 70 character title may get abruptly cut off or the nice word for it – “truncated”. Even worse, in instances where your title would formerly have been truncated,and show an ellipsis, now Google is replacing it with what they think the title should be – typically with a snippet from the page.
As usual, Google is not telling. It’s like “LEARN IT LOSER, EVEN THOUGH WE DIDN’T BOTHER TO TELL YOU!” Excel works great for listing URL’s, then building a title for them…even more so now. The easy way is to use your mouse to highlight the column headings (where the letters are across the top). Then use your mouse again to line up with the little line on the right side of the cell, about 1/2 ” from the letter column heading. Initially, your cursor will be a downward pointing arrow, but when it gets close enough to that little vertical line, it changes to a right-left pointing arrow with a vertical bar in the center.
At that point, left click your mouse and you will suddenly see a number given as the width, followed by the width in pixels, located in parenthesis. Adjust the width based on a final desired width of 512 pixels ( as best we can figure our from what Google HAS NOT told us). It’s a good idea to adjust that number downward though, because if a searcher’s query matches any words in the title, those matching words will be bolded and take up more pixels. So, if bolding would make your title 515 pixels wide, it will probably now be replaced with Google’s choice of text from the page that Google thinks would make a nice title!
Here’s To Getting Found!
Carlin Stanton