How much of a title does Google index? I don’t mean the 66 characters that are displayed in the SERPs but how much is actually read and tucked away in the event someone searches a keyword that is beyond the 66th character? As a live test, I’ve given this post a title that is 96 characters long. I’ve place strategic keywords past the 66 mark. After the post is indexed, I’ll search on the keywords in the title, which will not be repeated anywhere else, thus we shall see how much title content, if any, Google retains past the 66th character.
I’ll post a comment here and tweet/FB the results.
Stay tuned!
Dave Keys, Orange County SEO & Photography
Results Followup:
The answer? A lot! Everything past the 66 character mark was indexed and searchable. I tried several variations, with and without quotes, all of which were on terms past the 66 character mark. You know what this means for SEO. What we don’t know is how much weight is given to a term in the beginning, middle and end of a title. I’ve seen results, often, where the keywords in the center of a title rank the best.
Dave
Here are the results!
The answer? A lot! Everything past the 66 character mark was indexed and searchable. I tried several variations, with and without quotes, all of which were on terms past the 66 character mark. You know what this means for SEO. What we don’t know is how much weight is given to a term in the beginning, middle and end of a title. I’ve seen results, often, where the keywords in the center of a title rank the best.
Dave Keys – Orange County Photography
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That’s a neat test you did with the meta tags. But I do know that anything past 65-66 characters(title tag) gets cut off. I also wrote a blog post on SEO Services & Meta Tag Blog.