Comments on: Title Tag Test | SEO MythBuster Test #2

By: Manual Service

Manual Service — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:39:28 +0000

so, is this result final?

149 characters for the title?

and did you see a difference between the ranking power of those that show and those that don’t show?

I mean; have the words in the beginning of the title more value or not?
that would make sense … no?

By: Joost

Joost — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:25:09 +0000

The dots at the end of the title in Google are also boldened. Hadn’t seen that before…
Maybe it is 256 characters.

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:24:21 +0000

Aha! We have a result but I think I underestimated Google. They did indeed spider the page after spending a lot of time thinking about it!

Google in fact gulped down the whole title element we used in the test page.

That’s 25 words. 125 characters with no spaces. 149 with spaces.

So now we have a little surprise in store for Google when it returns. We’ve upped the characters in the title tag to push Google further to divulge more of it’s workings.

Note – Google seemed to use the whole 149 characters in this test to determine the serps.

I tested this with the keyphrase “hobod hoboy”.

By: Joost

Joost — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:27:40 +0000

Ok, makes sense.
Good luck

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:22:45 +0000

Yup I know exactly what is happened, and again, it was useful in some way.

Basically I think Google has thought “this page has a really spammy title, I’m going to ignore it”.

So lesson learned. If your page title is too spammy, Google will ignore it.

I’m going to modify the page to account for this because although it’s interesting it’s not really what I am testing here..

By: Joost

Joost — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:13:51 +0000

It’s 10 days later and it looks like Google has not indexed your test page….
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Ftitle -tag-seo%2F

It’s the same story for Yahoo.

Do you have any idea what’s going on?

By: Personal Injury Compensation

Personal Injury Compensation — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:59:39 +0000

Will be interested to hear the outcome. However I do know that when I inserted more keywords in my page title, my ranking for a common search term went up significantly.

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:22:55 +0000

Meble – Hopefully we’ll get a chance to test this and other things. Thanks for the comments all

By: seoidiot

seoidiot — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:47:58 +0000

I can’t wait!

By: Meble Biurowe

Meble Biurowe — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:16:29 +0000

The test is fine but you have ask yourself a question if google read for example 200 characters and in serps it shows only 65 how powerfull are the keywords in title if it is so long. Its obvious that main keywords should be at the beginning and the more keywords you have in the title the less its affects on you ranking. I always give not more then 3 phrases in title and more often i give 2 phrases. The shorter is title the better I got results.

By: Joost

Joost — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 02:51:21 +0000

Interesting test. I’m hoping it’s 256 characters, but probably it’s a lot less. I’ll put my money on somewhere around 100 characters.

By: Offices Glasgow

Offices Glasgow — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:06:16 +0000

Great Google test! Looking forward to the test results!