Title Tags for SEO: Length, Formulas by Page Type, and Why Google Rewrites Yours

You write the title tag; Google writes the title link

The title tag is a single line in the head of the page: <title>Metal Roof Repair in New Braunfels | Acme Roofing</title>. It also labels the browser tab and becomes the default name when someone bookmarks the page. What appears in Google is something slightly different, which Google calls the title link, and Google generates it automatically.

Google's title link documentation lists the sources it draws on. Your title element is first, but it is one of nine.

• The content of the title element, and the main visual title shown on the page
• Heading elements such as the H1, and other large, prominent text styled to stand out
• The og:title meta tag written for social sharing
• Other text on the page, and anchor text in the page's own links
• The text of links on other pages that point to this one
• WebSite structured data, for the site name

Most of the time your title wins. When Google changed its title system in 2021, it said in a September 2021 post that title elements were used around 87% of the time, up from around 80% when the change first rolled out. An outside measurement found more rewriting: an Ahrefs study of 953,276 top-ranking pages, published in November 2021, found the displayed title differed from the title tag 33.4% of the time. Both figures are several years old and neither has a newer public replacement; together they say rewrites are common enough to plan for.

Why Google rewrites title tags, problem by problem

Google's documentation names the specific problems that make it reach for other text. Every one of them shows up on small business sites, usually because a theme or plugin wrote the titles and nobody read them.

The pattern is consistent: Google rewrites titles that fail to describe the page in front of it. A title that is specific, current and true to the H1 is rarely touched. For pages in Spanish or another language, our guide to international SEO covers the rest of the setup, and keyword stuffing shows why the comma-separated title stopped working long ago.

Length is measured in pixels, not a character count

Google's documentation says there is no limit on how long a title element can be. Results truncate title links to fit the device width. So the real limit is a width on a screen, and characters vary in width: a capital W takes far more room than a lowercase i. Two titles of identical character count can be cut in different places.

The familiar 60-character rule is a rule of thumb from outside Google. The same 2021 Ahrefs study found rewrites more common on titles wider than about 600 pixels and suggested keeping titles within 600 pixels, with 60 characters as the practical shorthand. That is a reasonable target, provided you remember why it exists: so the words that decide the click are visible.

Since Google sets no limit, a truncated title is not an error and nothing in Search Console will flag it. The truncation only hides the words a searcher never gets to read, and the price of that is paid in clicks, which is the subject of our guide to click-through rate.

Title formulas for service, location, product and article pages

A formula is a starting point that keeps titles consistent across a site and different on every page. These are the ones we use for local businesses. The examples are hypothetical.

What the formulas have in common

Each names the one thing the page is for, in the words customers search, before anything else. Location goes in when location is part of the search, which for a service business is most of the time. The brand goes at the end on inner pages and first on the home page, where it is the answer to a brand search. Location pages need care: a title that only swaps the town name on otherwise identical pages is a doorway problem, not a title problem, and our guide to service area pages covers making each one worth indexing. Product titles for a store are covered in more depth in product page SEO.

Match the title to the H1 in meaning, not necessarily in wording. The title can carry the brand and the town; the H1 can be friendlier. If they disagree about what the page is, Google has two candidates and may pick the one you did not intend. Our checklist for on-page SEO covers the H1 and the rest of the page.

The brand name question, settled by Google's own advice

Should the business name be in every title? Google's advice is to brand titles concisely: put the site name at the start or end, separated by a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon or pipe, and avoid repeating a long brand description on every page. "| Acme Roofing" is fine. "| Acme Roofing, San Antonio's Most Trusted Family Roofer Since 1987" on two hundred pages is boilerplate that pushes the useful words off the screen.

There is a second mechanism. Google shows a site name above results on both mobile and desktop, generated from the home page and references to the site across the web. WebSite structured data on the home page is the strongest way to state your preferred name, and Google may drop a brand from the title link when the same name already appears as the site name. Our schema markup guide covers that markup and the rest of structured data.

Forty pages called Services: finding duplicate titles

Duplicate titles are the most common title problem we find and the easiest to miss, because nobody reads titles in bulk. They usually come from a template: a theme that titles every page with the site name, a CMS that copies the parent page's title, or location pages cloned from one original. Google counts repeated and boilerplate titles among the reasons it rewrites, and duplicates also make it harder for Google to tell which page should rank for which search.

1. 1

   Crawl the site

   Run the free site audit, or any desktop crawler, and export every URL with its title. Sort by title to see duplicates side by side.

2. 2

   Check what Google shows

   Search site:yourdomain.com in Google and scan the title links. Pages where Google replaced your title tell you which ones it found wanting. Our Google search operators guide covers more tricks like this.

3. 3

   Fix templates before pages

   If forty pages share a title, the template is wrong. Change the rule once, then hand-edit the important pages.

4. 4

   Assign one search per page

   Two pages with near-identical titles often target the same search. Decide which page owns it; our keyword mapping work does this for a whole site.

5. 5

   Give Google time

   Google has to recrawl a page before a new title counts, which its documentation says can take a few days to a few weeks.

Testing a new title without fooling yourself

A title change is one of the few SEO edits with a measurable result, if you measure it properly. In Google Search Console, open the Performance report, filter to the page, and note clicks, impressions, average position and click-through rate for the four weeks before the change. Change the title, confirm Google shows it, then compare the same length of time afterward.

• Compare like with like: a page that moved from position 8 to position 4 will get more clicks whatever its title says, so check position before crediting the words.
• Change one thing at a time, or one template at a time, so the result is readable.
• Allow for seasons. A pool builder's title test in March proves little against February.
• Do not rewrite titles every week. Each change resets the clock and muddies the data.

Most owners fix their five most valuable titles, see the difference, and then notice the other two hundred pages. That is the point to hand it off. On sites DataCram builds, title templates live in code, and Iris, the Athena CMS agent for titles, descriptions and structured data, drafts page titles for approval. Title and description work is part of every SEO program, and our guide to meta tags covers the description that sits beneath the title. For what to read next, the SEO guide has the full map.