Long page titles
Every page has a title that appears in search results, browser tabs, and shared links. Silktide reports pages whose titles are long enough that search engines are likely to cut them off.
The title is set with the <title> tag in the page's header:
<!-- Likely to be truncated in search results -->
<title>Contact us - Customer support, sales inquiries, press office, and general questions - Example Corporation</title>
<!-- Concise and complete -->
<title>Contact us - Example Corporation</title>
Why this matters
Search engines display only a limited amount of a page's title - roughly 50 to 60 characters, measured in pixels rather than characters, so the exact cutoff varies. Anything beyond that is truncated with an ellipsis, and if the important words are at the end, searchers never see them. Titles are one of the strongest influences on whether someone clicks your result.
Long titles also make browser tabs and bookmarks harder to tell apart, since only the first few words are visible.
How to fix it
- Rewrite the title to put the page's unique, descriptive words first, and keep the whole title within about 60 characters.
- Trim boilerplate: long site or department names appended to every title are the most common cause. A short brand suffix is fine; a full legal name on every page is not.
- Not every page needs a short title. Prioritize landing pages and pages you expect to rank in search; for unimportant pages you can the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Read the page's
<title>tag. - Count the characters of its text.
- Flag the title when it is longer than 60 characters.
Search engines truncate by pixel width rather than character count, so a title slightly over 60 characters made of narrow letters may display in full, and a shorter one in wide capitals may not. The 60-character threshold is a practical approximation of the display limit.