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Google has a new design and with that your title tag length, the blue clickable link in the Google search results, may be impacted.
Pete Meyers from Moz posted New Title Tag Guidelines & Preview Tool. He says the new title tag length is not set at 55 or a specific length, but ranges between 42 and 68 depending on Google's algorithm.
Here is the distribution chart on how likely it would be a specific character length:
I should note, this has no impact on rankings. Just because Google cuts off your title tag, it doesn't mean it isn't used in its entirety for rankings. But it does mean that your title tags may be less click friendly.
A WebmasterWorld thread is seeing a lot of questions about the title tag changes.
As martinibuster put it:
This is just the display of the Title tag, not the consumption of it by the algorithm. So, as you already noted, a shorter title may be more general. I'm not changing anything for Google. If a slightly longer title makes sense then that's what's going in the title.This doesn't really change anything for me, though. I don't do exact match longtail titles. Prefer to match it generally in the title and more exactly in the text of the content.
Check out the Moz post for more details.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
James R. Halloran
03/31/2014 03:53 pm
I remember reading that study on Moz. It sounds like Google is even trying to curb people from generating a good snippet for themselves. But why? Legitimate people need their headlines read correctly, too.
Christopher Shaffer
03/31/2014 04:10 pm
Because they redesigned the serp they are trying to make it hard to generate a good snippet..........WHAT?
Joe Simmonds
03/31/2014 08:01 pm
A significant number of your overall snippet impressions are going to be from mobile and a 65 character title tag is likely going to be truncated for them anyway.
i know stuff
04/01/2014 02:23 am
You see more characters on mobile search quite often, as they extend it over multiple lines.
Ankit Patel
04/01/2014 07:31 am
Last few days I noticed that Google consider Brand Name (Domain Name) in Title Tag that means in some of cases Google automatically add Brand name (Domain Name) in the title. So for now we have to deduct Brand Name(Domain) character from title tags.
Jitendra Vaswani
04/02/2014 05:11 am
I hate these shorter titles