Sphinn - Google; “You can put 50+ words in your title tag, we’ll read it”

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Sphinn It!

Google; “You can put 50+ words in your title tag, we’ll read it”

Went Hot: August 5, 2007 - 11:02 am
Posted By: Hobo 433 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk)
Category: Google

A simple experiment to test how many words you can put in the title element and still expect to be indexed and ranked by Google.

8 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from Jill 433 days ago #

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This is interesting...nice test!

from MattMcGee 433 days ago #

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I'll give it a Sphinn because it's good info., but to me the recommendation about 60-70 characters in your Page Title was always about two things:

1) That's all that shows in the SERPs, and

2) After that, the words in the title have diminishing importance.

So, how about another test where you use two pages, both with absurd Title elements. Put the same nonsense word near the beginning of the Title in Page 1 and farther away in Page 2, and then let's see which one ranks better for the nonsense word.

In fact, you might also put the nonsense word in the page copy of the 2nd page to see how that affects things.

Jill's right -- it's interesting and it opens the door to all kinds of ideas. :)

BTW, did you check Yahoo?

from qwerty 433 days ago #

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I ran a similar test a couple of years ago, and I noticed something odd which is apparently still true: you can search on the text in your title tag and the page will be returned, but if you try it with an intitle search, there will be a point at which it won't come up.

In my tests, that was at word 11. I couldn't get exactly the same result on yours because apparently there are plenty of pages out there with words like "hoboj" in the title, so I had to use two-word strings to test.

"HoboK" is the eleventh word in your title.

intitle:"HoboK HoboL" brings up your page.

intitle:"HoboL HoboM" returns nothing.

If you want to see my test pages, they're at http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/11-test.htm, http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/11-test-2.htm, and http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/11-test-3.htm. I didn't write up the results, so the goals of the tests are explained in their meta description tags.

from TimDineen 433 days ago #

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Great info Hobo and qwerty. Thanks for this.

from Gids 432 days ago #

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Adding my gratitude to Hobo and Qwerty - all interesting stuff.

from Hobo 432 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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Cheers!

from Teddie 432 days ago #

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It's a bit misleading to describe this as about numbers of 'words' because really it's about character counts and truncation points. Actually the behavior from Google looks pretty clear.

Look at the cache data of the results closely.

[Hob1h] > the cache clearly shows that Google indexed and highlighted the last search term in the title tag, but not specifically as title text.

[allintext: Hob1h] > Yep it has got it in the page text.

[allintitle: Hob1h] > Nope it has not treated as title text.

[allintitle: HoboL site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > count through using the words from HoboJ to HoboN and you can see that the word 'HoboL' is actually the last word stored as part of the title field at Google, even though it has been truncated and dooesn't show in the results page, after that the rest aren't stored as part of the title but are definitely stored somewhere because we can search for any of them as in page text.

[allintitle: HoboN site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > Nope

[allintext: HoboN site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > Yes

This looks to indicate that after the limit at which the title itself truncates Google treats the overun as normal text in the page. Now I wonder how many more words you could actually get in there?

from WebDrops 432 days ago #

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oh!! this is just fantastic... till now i was thinking google just accept 20 to 25 keywords... I guess google is accepting any and everything these days ... ;)