It simply doesn’t fit the available space, and Google has

[bhasan01854]

Here’s a brief rundown: 85,340 page-one results 71,603 unique URLs 57,832 <title> tags 33,733 rewrites You might be doing the math right now, realizing that 58% of the <title> tags we tracked were rewritten, and rushing to Twitter to express your outrage. Please don’t — at least not yet. First, there are bound to be quirks, like cached <title> tags that don’t match the current site, sites that blocked or modified our requests, cloaking, etc. I suspect those cases are relatively rare, but we can’t discount them.


Second, “rewrite” is a tricky word, because it implies a meaningful difference between turkey gambling data the original version and rewritten version. Of this data set, over 13,000 <title> tags were over 600 pixels wide, the physical limit of Google’s desktop display title. Over 7,000 showed simple (...) truncation. Google has been doing this for years. Here’s an example from October 2011 (via the Wayback Machine): Are these really “rewrites” in any meaningful sense? To understand what Google’s doing, and how it differs from the past, we need to dig deep into the unique scenarios at play.


Scenario #1: Simple truncation (...) Google can only fit so much on one line. That limit has changed over the years, but the basic fact remains. In many cases, <title> tags are just too long, and that’s not always a bad thing or necessarily spammy. Here’s one example and its corresponding search result: This is a wordy <title> tag and we could certainly argue the merits of academic vs. marketing copy, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with or spammy about it.


to account for that. Scenario #2: Complex truncation (...) Even prior to the recent update, we saw a less common variant of this scenario, where Google would truncate a title and then append the brand after the “...”: In this example, Google truncated the tag with “...” but then re-inserted the brand. Note that the original pipe (|) was replaced with a hyphen (-).