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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This is a great information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google will display up to 70 characters without truncating. Look at the Discover Card listing when you search for ‘credit cards.
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!
Thanks for the info, I thought G still had 65/150 as a maximum.
Will rewrite some tags to fit an extra keyword in…
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?
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.
I understand there is really no way to know, but I’m sure they will all keep changing it up. Thanks again
What do the top 3 search engines like to see for the Keyword Meta Tag?
A great article.
Is there any limitation for meta keywords?
I think for some small search engines, the length may be a little different.
In firefox, it shows much long for titles of web pages.
How should we do then?
I found Google displaying Title with 71 Characters and Description with 220 Characters
Check Google.com with Keyword – longest Google title character length
Title:What is the Maximum Character Length for a URL that Google Will Index? (71 Characters)
Description: The question in question is already mentioned in the title and h1 of this …. Fortunately, these character length restrictions rely on the value of the …. The longest functional URL that Google will crawl and index is (220 Characters)
I came across 78 Character Title in Google
Check Google.com with Keyword – longest Google title character length Google Book
Refer Page 7
Title:Statistical Analysis of Network Data: Methods and Models – Google Books Result (78 Characters)
@Richard Williams – Interesting finds! I wouldn’t count that 78 Character Title you found as such though. I would count that as 56 since the ” – Google Books Result” is appended by Google and merely to clarify the listing. Cheers!
This is a good article, thanks.
@Greg
I read full post & get info regarding length of Title tag & Meta description. But, I have problem with my Title tag display in Yahoo. Yahoo search is not displaying my Title tag during web search listing. Yahoo search shows me my domain name instead of Title tag. Other side, Google & Bing is displaying my Title tag. So, How can I solve out this kind of issue. I have not submitted my website to Dmoz.
Thanks for compiling all of them in one post. The screenshots are especially helpful.
Thanks for the detailed post, I knew the limits were roughly around the sixty something and 150 something but this is just what I was looking for. Will be really interesting to see if longer examples keep popping up and if someone can work out the exact situations when they are allowed or disallowed.
Matt
if my title leght is above than 300 words any problem sith search engines ? kindly reply me
Very handy article. Many thanks.
I am wondering if the title must be shorter than 78 or 71 characters…
@SOC if you are still having this problem, feel free to email me with the URL in question and I’ll gladly take a look at it.
@orkutscraps There is no point to having your title that long. Shorten it to keyword rich title in the appropriate title length.
@kim I would keep your title length at 65 characters or less for maximum compatibility across the engines.
This message is very useful!
Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the post, it was very useful
yes, thanks, that has made things a lot clearer.. clear info and good SEO on your site, it came right up as first entry on Google!
Nice information.. thanks for sharing!!!
I personally like phone numbers in the description for local businesses. Any thoughts?
@Paul — I think that’s an excellent idea especially if you are a local business. Several devices and pieces of software (including the iPhone & Skype) will turn the phone number in a meta description into a link that can be dialed when clicked. The caveat for most places would be that they will lose sight of where the click or call may have come from or gone to. If you set up a unique call tracking phone number for this purpose, you will get some attribution which will definitely help in understanding how your marketing dollars are best spent as well as letting you know how beneficial it is for you to have a phone number in the meta-description.
Is the title length limit just aesthetics? In other words, does Google only display a title up to 69 characters but it indexes a longer length? I am fairly certain that when my title is longer, it still ranked better for all keywords including titles that do not display entirely because of the limit. (I could be wrong)
Sorry if I missed the answer somewhere on this page.
@Rudy – Great question. There has been quite a bit of testing on this over the years and the answer seems to change all the time. Back in May of 2010 tests were showing that Google would index 84 characters. A little over 1 week later (and the most recent testing I’ve encountered), a test was conducted to see how many characters in a Title tag does Google index. That test, from June of 2010, showed that Google was indexing upwards of 213 characters.
Fantastic information. I just ran one of those free website title, description, and meta tag tests and it showed problems with my website in nearly every area. I fixed it according to what the test recommended. Then of course, I decided to hunt down the information on the internet. Now I’m good for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. Thank You!!!
This is really cool. I just quoted it on SEOChat forums too. Good to know how the different search engines treat your site!
150 is what I’m going by as well…
very great information
it’s really useful post….
Amazing post with good example.A lot of tutorials are on the web for SEO.But Only one of them are trustworthy.This post is really useful and clearing all the doubts which a SEO beginner have about the meta description tag.
I used an SEO tool call attracta and it did say that some of my pages were too long for title tag, one example was this one which was 75 characters long.
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Should I be reducing this to 65 maximum so that google with index the page?
Thanks for your help.
Sam
Fantastic information. Thanks for sharing !
Its a Clear Info and good in SEO part in every site, it was very useful
Thanks for sharing the information about title tag and meta description.
Nowadays google is not considering metakeywords.
hmmm well done informative and interesting post about title tag and meta description + SEO. thanks a lot for your unique info.
Exactly what I was looking for. Even though I work with websites on a regular basis I wasn’t exactly sure what the figures were.
Carefully crafting your description and title with so few characters is difficult but well worth the time. I actually managed to boost my uniques by around 20% on one of my sites last week with no change in SERPS!
It was a great information about meta tag handling for each search engines. Thanks you..
I agree with Right Click, spending the time to fine tune your meta description tags — while not helping with SEO rankings — could help a lot with your click thru rate.
Thank you for sharing your analyzation of all the 4 major search engines’ meta tag handling.
Title and meta description is an important part of SEO. So if we follow the above mentioned information it will be very nice….
I am just looking for meta tags length for my new website and found your blog on google it’s really very helpful Thanks
It took me a little while to scroll from top to bottom. Interesting.
Mr. Greg – Thanks for the suggestion and sharing the information.
is it ok to go ahead for
Title: 65-69 or ??
Description: 150-230 or ??
Keywords: ??
Thanks in advance.
Cheers