As a regular user of Twitter, I noticed a tweet from Shaun Anderson (aka the hobo) that caught my attention. He had written a blog post about a case where a client had contacted him saying that had dropped in the rankings. On analysis of their site, he discovered that Google had heavily penalised the website for using ’spammy’ page titles. Now, a recommended maximum length for a title is approx 60-70 characters, and if your title extends this then it is normally ‘chopped’ off at the character limit when the results are displayed in Google SERPS. We would recommend adhering to his limit to avoid a ’spammy’ looking title in the eyes of both users and the search engines, and also because some browsers won’t actually display more than this character limit either.
In the case of Shaun Anderson, the clients title was long but not malformed, but was packed full of relevant keywords totalling around 500 characters!! Crazy, I know! When he performed a search for the website, Google actually didn’t display the title at all, only a full stop where the title should be. To anyone that does not know the website, that would appear extremely untrustworthy! Not only has the site been knocked down the rankings, but it now also looks ‘dodgy’ which will no doubt reduce the organic traffic even further.
There are a lot of people still trying to manipulate the search engine rankings through clever techniques, and it appears that as ever, Google is slowly cracking down on all of this kind of behaviour. If you’re using some page titles that aren’t properly optimised, we would recommend updating them accordingly now or risk facing the wrath of Google!
