Whether you’re a beginner in SEO or a seasoned pro, it’s important to keep up on how your pages will be displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) across each engine. Every engine displays your page differently and depending on what you are trying to target there are different approaches to optimizing by engine. This article is not to tell you how to optimize your pages, it is merely to give you the current character count that is displayed for the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com
A few years ago (2004), Yahoo would display up to 120 characters in the Title Tag. Can you believe it? So much has changed since then. Earlier this year, we had MSN. Now we have Bing. Do you know the proper meta description length displayed in Bing? You’re about to..
Google Title Length and Meta Description Length
Google shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for Page Title.
Google shows 156 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.
It should also be known that if you don’t include a Meta Description or if Google feels a better description for your page could be given by using a web snippet, then the description shown can be up to 320 characters. Of course, they won’t be the characters that you choose so they might not best represent what you wish your audience to see in the SERP’s.
Yahoo Title Length and Meta Description Length
Though I couldn’t find an official number from Yahoo, I have seen that
Yahoo shows up to 72 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title. (PDF’s up to 75 characters)
Yahoo shows up to 161 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.
Bing Title Length and Meta Description Length
According to the Bing Webmaster Blog:
Bing shows 65 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title Tag.
Bing shows up to 150 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description Tag.
However, as you can see in the example above, Bing will readily show 69 characters for the Title Tag and up to 185 for the description.
Ask.com Title Length and Meta Description Length
Ask shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for an SEO Page Title.
I’ve never seen Ask.com use the meta description tag for it’s results. Instead it pulls a snippet of text from the page and can commonly display around 312 characters for a description.
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Original Photo “Official measures, Bern” by addedentry.
Most recent posts by Greg Habermann
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Thanks for taking the time! Although as a rule I tend to err on the low side of length for Titles, Descriptions, etc.. There is evidence to suggest that you can go farther without harm and perhaps even benefit. Just be mindful of where each of these meta tags stop displaying on the SERPs.
@Richard
The best way to check the Max Length of Title and Meta Description is SERP of respective search engines….
you got your meta description down to a tea, other wise I would not have read your post
. Just one thing, is it better to leave the description longer to create some interest for people to visit your site to get the rest of the sentence.
Thanks for an informative post.
So if my title is like: “kw1 kw2 kw3 kw4 kw5″ and my site ranks ok for searching “kw1 kw2″ I will improve my rankings for the previous search phrase removing the last 3 keywords for the title (having the title “kw1 kw2″)? Thank you.
Sometimes trying to decide the title length for each major search engine is like trying to hit a moving target. I really appreciate the work you have put into this and your thoughtfulness to share. Where I would normally get confused is at what point will the search engines begin to truncate the last word. Many Thanks!
I love it when Google takes you to a blog that has just the answer you are looking for. I’m optimizing my meta description now and making it keyword friendly, and now the correct length too. Thanks
Fantastic info mate! Just finished aligning and cleaning my webpage code from unneeded meta’s and scripts. Was wondering (forgot) about the limit for the title tag (for Google and Bing). Helped me a lot!
Really thanks so much for sharing the nice information with us!!!
thank you very much, very usefull information!
I created a handy tool to make creating page titles easier. It counts the number of characters as your typing and shows how the listing will look in Google. In case anyone wants to check it out:
http://www.statcentric.com/analytics/tools/google-search-preview.aspx
@Levi, thanks it is a great preview tool
Do you have stats that show how many characters Google web bot will read for “indexing” – not convinced that what “displays” for a title in a browser would be the same amount of characters picked up by a bot for search indexing. Thx.
usefull information!
@Levi, thanks for great tool.
It’s a really great information. Before I was confused, now I’m confirmed.
Do spaces count as characters or only actual text?
Spaces count as characters in dealing with title tag and decsription length for all the search engines.
Thanks Greg!
Thanks! This is just the info I needed. Can we get a yearly update though?
@Cheryl – Glad you found this helpful. Been meaning to do a yearly update for a while now but keep forgetting. I’ll see if I can find some time
Thank you for this information.
Description is very important, not only for SE, but for web surfers to make a choice on SERPS.
Thanks for this info.
I knew about Google but not about Bing and Yahoo
Regards
Hello Greg!
Thank you for researching this. Anyone else notice that seomofo’s snippet no longer displays correctly? (It used to say SEO written in w’s)
http://www.google.com/search?q=seomofo
My guess is meta description length has been shortened… again. Jerks…
Any thoughts?
~Alexander Pokorny
@alexander I hadn’t noticed that but it does not display correctly anymore. It appears that the length of the description tag is shortened for the #1 spot to around 93 characters when that result has sitelinks displaying. The new expanded sitelinks, give much more real estate to a prominent #1 organic listing as they also add descriptions below each page title. In the remainder of the SERP’s a “normal” listing still gets the longer meta-description.
Hope this helps!
One of the basic things that should be observed in on-page optimization is about how search engines show the title and description snippet on web result. This will help you a lot in order to rank and as well influence the user to click on your website. Always appreciate informative posts like this. Thank you for putting it up.
Wonderful summary so I know exactly how much space I have for these key SEO tags. Each time I upgrade to a new theme, I have to re-learn
I was looking for the google description length, but glad to find out about Yahoo and Bing too. Let’s not forget them!
very good information about the title and description
I think every one generally optimizes for Google and forget about the others. When i was reviewing my meta description tag I could remember how many characters i had to use. Reading your site it got me thinking about bing. Allthough most of my traffic comes from google and directories, bing does send me some traffic and I should probably pay more attention to getting more traffic from a better listing on bing search results. i dont think many people search with ask these days, maybe years ago – ask jeeves !
Thanks Greg for sharing a valuable information about meta tags, but google not indexing 60 characters title which kept it for my website it is indexing only 56 characters is there any recent changes happen in google algorithm?
@Mehendra – I see it displaying about 64, which seems about right since it’s truncating in the middle of a word and the Title on your page is 77 characters. SERP Title length example
Valuable info on meta tags lenght.
Merci!
Thanks Greg laying out this information, doing a search on this subject, finding your article, was certainly not disappointed, getting much more info than seeking. Concentrating on Google’s algo, some say 70, 69 makes perfect sense too.
However, what I am seeing is some title tags showing much shorter than that, while others on same pg showing full length. Could you please respond, if aware of these inconsistencies, keeping title tags below the 69 character mark? Have title 62, but G is only showing 51, while others on same pg showing full 69. Tks! Cal
@Cal Hi Cal.. do you have an example you could show?