Search algorithm for number of letters in page title
According to online advisers, the number of letters used in the title of your web page is counted and scored against the total number allowed by search engines such as Google.
For example if the maximum allowed is 66 letters and your page title only contains 57 letters then you receive a lower score.
As to whether search engines such as Google do in fact use this criteria or not is unclear, however there must be a maximum after which you can be causing a problem by requiring their spider to store excess data. In any case, if Google has set a lower letter count for titles than other search engines, then they should not be penalizing at all.
SEOs recommending that a title be maximized just for sake of it is a ridiculous ask if the title is no longer specific. A title needs to be a clear and concise description of what the page is about, and who knows best? The author of the page or a formula designed by someone with little to no experience in cataloging and managing a web site.
Also, other considerations come into play where the web pages are created on the fly from databases such as in the case of shopping carts:
- does the solution in fact use the product title in the page title?
- how many letters has been assigned to the product title field?
Our test team knows of many cms, shopping cart and portal solutions that do not use product titles as their page titles and some that do use them but to be compatible with ALL search engines of the time (when they were written) only use a shortened version of the title. The owners of web sites using such solutions will not know of the changes that may have been made to such criteria. Nor may they be able to make any modifications to those solutions which may be written in ASP, CGI, PHP, etc and if its written in ASP.NET then not even most web designers will be able to make the changes.
