Title Tag and Meta Description Length for Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask

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.

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Posted in Featured, SEO by Greg |

Carazoo.com India Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 6:33 am
This is a great information.
lee johnson Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Ha Ha looks like you took a little advice from my site: http://www.lee-johnson.com/google-meta-serp-tool.html good call and its great advice too.
greg Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Hey guys, glad you liked the article. Lee, I hadn’t seen your tool before now. I did use the tool over at seomofo.com though to make my first example. It appears to do the same thing.
Eric Itzkowitz Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Nice page to bookmark for quick reference.
RE: 69 Characters for Google Title Tag
I believe the caveat to achieving a complete 69 character listing is to ensure your title actually ends at 69 characters, otherwise it will become truncated.
Perhaps this is a coincidence, but it also seems that each 69 character listings I’ve seen include a period as the 69th character. As such, I have always tried to create 68 character titles.
SEOKudos Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Title Tag and Meta Description Length for Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask…
Kudos for a great SEO article – Trackback from SEOKudos…
greg Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Good call Eric. Personally I always shoot for 65 characters max for Title and 150 characters maximum for Description. That way I’m short, to the point and will show for all engines.
David Shapiro Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Google will display up to 70 characters without truncating. Look at the Discover Card listing when you search for ‘credit cards.
Jacob Stoops Says:
August 12th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Good info. I prefer to keep my titles around 65-70 characters, and I try to keep my meta descriptions under 250 characters. With the meta description, it is important to make the first 150 characters are very impactful, but if you’re showing up for a long-tail search Google may display as many as 275 characters!
Zilver Says:
August 17th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Thanks for the info, I thought G still had 65/150 as a maximum.
Will rewrite some tags to fit an extra keyword in…
Jon | Fish Pittsburgh Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Thank you for such a well put together post. Everything I was looking for was nicely put together in one place and was very easy to understand.
Do anyone have an idea how often they change these limits or if they change them?
greg Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Thank you for the compliments and I’m glad that you found the post helpful. In regards to how often they change? I honestly can’t say. Each engine is unique and they are always experimenting with displaying information in different ways.
For example, as Jacob noted above, your description can show as many as 275 characters in long-tail queries in Google currently. Who’s to say when that will change. As for the next change I’d expect to see, perhaps Yahoo’s limits might change when their search results start being served up by Microsoft Bing.
Jon | Fish Pittsburgh Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I understand there is really no way to know, but I’m sure they will all keep changing it up. Thanks again
Mike S Says:
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
What do the top 3 search engines like to see for the Keyword Meta Tag?
Excel Tip for Easy Title Tag and Description Tag Optimization | Debi'Z Blog Says:
November 24th, 2009 at 6:18 am
[...] different search engines have different maximum lengths for the titles and descriptions that they will show in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Google will show up to 69 [...]
About the Title Tag « Alicia Vaz Says:
November 27th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
[...] Title Tag and Meta Description Length for Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask. [...]
Richard Says:
January 6th, 2010 at 6:53 am
A great article.
Is there any limitation for meta keywords?
Richard Says:
January 6th, 2010 at 6:54 am
I think for some small search engines, the length may be a little different.
Richard Says:
January 8th, 2010 at 3:42 am
In firefox, it shows much long for titles of web pages.
How should we do then?