Will Google Read All the Text From a Title That Is Too Long?

Many SEOs seem to get worried if their titles are "too long". Too long means that the end of a title is cut off by an ellipse (....) when displayed in the SERPs. The concern is that Google won't consider any of the text that has been cut off.

According to MOZ, Google will display 50-60 characters in a title in a SERP.

When we did this test a couple of years ago, we found that Google will index a page based on the clipped - meaning not visible - text in the SERPs test.

We decided to give this test a re-run and see if any of the recent Google updates have influenced its result.

Will Google read all the text from the title that is too long or will it read just the visible part of the title? Let's find out!

We set up the test like this..

Hypothesis: Google reads everything a in a title even if some of the title text is clipped by an ellipse (...) and the text is not visible in the SERPs

As a test setup, we created a page with a title containing 128 characters. That title is "too long" for all of it to be displayed in the SERPs. A fake keyword was put at the end of the title. That keyword will cut off.  The fake keyword only exists in the title and nowhere else on the page.

Here is what we discovered

The page became indexed by Google.

Final Takeaway

Things really don't change too much in Google. Checking old tests is always a good way to stay up-to-date and it's nice to see that this hasn't changed either. We truly believe that Google is only trying to get the edge cases and will pretty much leave 70-80% of all SEO alone. Incidentally, the title that appears in the SERP for the test page is 59 characters.  MOZ for the win!
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