SEO meta title: what Google does with your title tag

A meta title is the title element

Despite the name, it is not a meta tag. The description is a meta tag; the title is its own element in the head of the page:

<title>Blue running shoes for wide feet · Example Store</title>
<meta name="description" content="...">

Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element.

Every page, and a different one on each. That is the first instruction and the one most often broken by templates.

Meta title length: a width, not a count

While there’s no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.

Searched for directly on that page: 60 characters does not appear, nor 50, nor any figure in pixels. The number every other guide opens with is a rule of thumb from people measuring results, and a reasonable one for a desktop screen. It is not Google’s.

Width is the honest unit, because a title of capital Ms runs out of room long before one in narrow lower-case letters. If you want to know where yours is likely to be cut, measure its width rather than counting its letters.

Your title tag is one of nine sources

Google’s generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web.

The sources it lists, in its order:

1. 1Content in <title> elements
2. 2Main visual title shown on the page
3. 3Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
4. 4Content in og:title meta tags
5. 5Other content that’s large and prominent through the use of style treatments
6. 6Other text contained in the page
7. 7Anchor text on the page
8. 8Text within links that point to the page
9. 9WebSite structured data

Eight of them are on your own page. One, the text of links pointing at the page, is other people’s words. That is why a good title is necessary and still not a guarantee: Google is choosing a line, and your title is its first candidate.

The practical consequence is the second source. Google reads the main visible heading too, so a title and an h1 that say the same thing in slightly different words give it two consistent candidates instead of two competing ones.

Google also says it has to recrawl the page to notice a change, which may take a few days to a few weeks. A new title that has not appeared yet after a day is not a failed title.

Why Google rewrote your meta title

Google names seven problems that lead it to show something else. Each one has a check you can run on your own page in under a minute.

If none of these applies, Google’s advice is to ask whether the line it chose fits the search better than yours did. Sometimes it does.

One case is different. If robots.txt blocks the page, Google cannot read the title at all and may build the title link from other sites’ anchor text. That one is covered in indexed, though blocked by robots.txt.

How to write a meta title Google keeps

Google’s best practices, in plain terms:

• Describe the page. “Home” and “Profile” are its examples of what not to write.
• Keep it concise. Long, wordy titles are cut, and the cut is by width.
• Say each phrase once. Repeating a keyword in variations reads as spam to Google and to people.
• Make every page’s title different, and drop boilerplate that only changes by one word.
• Put the brand at the start or end, once, separated by a hyphen, colon or pipe. Save any longer description of the site for the home page.
• Write it in the language and alphabet of the page.

None of that is about squeezing in a keyword. It is about giving Google a line it has no reason to replace.

The quotations on this page, the searches run against Google’s page, and the date it was read are kept in the repository so this can be re-checked rather than trusted.