Maximum Page Title length

The longest page title that I would use is 67 characters, many use a 60 character limit, some use 64, and some 128.

I’ve read different opinions on webmaster and seo forums (like 64 character limit and truncate to 64 if longer than 70), but seen with my own eyes that the page title on a serp can be up to 70 characters, this is including the … that is added, so that leaves 67 characters as the max, but only if your word boundary falls at the 67th character! huh?…read on for more.

Google truncates (and may not index) anything over 67 characters (including spaces) if you have a page title over 70 characters, based upon what I’ve seen. Looks to me like the length varies because the truncation is to the next shortest whole word. Amazingly, I’ve not actually read or heard this, so try it for yourself if you want to believe it. Just search for whatever and use a text editor to count characters on the longest titles returned on the search results page.

The truncated part (the tailing part is clipped off and discarded) may not even be indexed! I am not sure of this, but have a personal policy of not deliberately using anything over 67 characters to describe my page.

Also a longer page title “dilutes” the keyword weighting of those that are in the title, so if you use a long title with lots of words the ones you do use will have less importance to the search engine.

About 6  to 7 words is a good working objective.

How to remove your website or your phone number or webpage from google

There are cases where you do not want to be in google’s index. For instance if you have an old webpage that has been replaced by a new webpage, but the old one comes up higher in google’s results.

To remove your old webpage or website or blog from google.

Or if you have a phone number listed in google’s phone lookup and don’t want it to be listed on the search engine.

To remove your phone number from google.

If you have an old website location or URL that you replaced with a new one or you have a second webpage that points to your other webpage google prefers it if you do a 301 permanent redirect on the old website.

If you don’t want a certain page to show up in google’s cache, if you take it down, it will instantly disappear, you can tell google not to cache your webpage.

ex: META NAME=”googlebot” content=”noarchive” in the HEAD section of the HTML files.

If you have a page that is already in the cache, you can request it be removed from google’s index, or a quick and dirty workaround is to replace your cached page with a blank page (on the same server with the same title) and the next time google spiders your page it will update the cache of that page by removing all previous text on it.

Google maps business listing free

Here’s the place you can show up on a google map with your business name, website, contact info and info for free.

Your listing will only show up within a certain radius of your zipcode of your listing. Need more info here!

Google tools I use

Google Webmaster Tools Troubleshoot your website’s robots.txt file and many other factors.

Google Analytics Comprehensive log analysis at google, from Urchin code.

Information of interest to webmasters posted on the official google blog website

Matt Cutts blog, and just the Google/SEO section, it’s pretty much a tool, senior engineer at google in charge of filtering web spam. Lots of good tricks here, but you must be a patient reader, he’ll post, then a jillion people comment saying “Hey Matt, my website ratings bombed after we moved our server, what gives!?”, he gets overloaded with questions, so I firefox search scan the page for only his answers if I don’t have an extra hour!

Google Trends just showed up on my radar, surprised it’s not in the “My Account” area, I found it on the official google blog.

Another new tool that works much like Google Trends, only more straightforward, “See what the world is searching for”:
Google Insights

Hyphens in URLs or URL Rewriting – get search engine friendly

The article on

Hyphens in URLs or “URL Rewriting” for Wordpress SEO or any SEO:

is located here, this applies to dashes in the URL and whether you want them or not for SEO and usability purposes. It also shows how to rewrite your URL using Wordpress to do the rewrite (as usual, the self-hosted application on your server)

If you want to do URL Rewriting not using Wordpress, you might want to read why first, and then go to a great tutorial on doing this at a low level if you want to get your hands dirty.

In any case, the link above will take you there…

Website traffic analysis, SEO, and hit tracking with Google Analytics

How to track your website visitors and do website hit tracking and analysis using Google’s services.

Google acquired Urchin a great website tracking tool, which embeds code on your website’s server, then google analyses it on their end. You use your google account to check your website traffic (you have to create a login if you don’t already have one)

The results are very detailed and once you set this up you will be able to receive charts and graphs of traffic patterns including some really helpful detailed information beside “Page Views” and “Unique Views” such as “Keywords“, and “Top Traffic Sources“.

So, login to google, then go to “My Account”, then (click) “Analytics” (it’s currently their top link on the right side for “My Products”), then “Add Website Profile” then past your URL in (copy it from your URL bar so you don’t have any problems with syntax or typos) and (click) “Continue”, then copy the Tracking Code (the new tracking code ga.js had a syntax error missing a “>” that the google engineers missed which made faulty code in the era of My-Jul 2008, but works now), then when you click “Finish” you’ll get a list of your websites that google is currently tracking using the Urchin engine.

Your new addition will be there, but it will read “Tracking Unknown” under the column “Status”, you can then click “Check Status” where you can force feed it your website index page (the first one to load and the page that should have your google tracking code in it)

Next you’ll need to download your index.php or index.html, or index.htm or index.etc and add the javascript tracking code that you copied in to your clipboard to your webpage (you haven’t replaced your clipboard contents by copying something else since the google tracking code, new or Legacy, have you?). It should be right in front of your </body> tag so that most of your page can load before the user’s browser must get the rest of the page from analytics.google.com! If you run Wordpress or another dynamic page creation engine or blog generator, then you must put it into a template that loads into the page, like footer.php.

When your tracking code is in place do the “Check Status” then “Finish” (button) routine and google will instantly re read your website index page and look for the tracking code it issued to your website domain.

From now on, then you can login in to analytics.google.com and you will get the detailed website traffic reports on that website and have them downloadable as a beautifully formatted pdf so you can email them to your customers.

Go start collecting!

Google SEO (search engine optimization) information

Google Quality Guidelines, Matt Cutts’ blog, Search Engine Watch, and daily searchcast (a podcast) are good places to check this stuff out.

I am putting all my google SEO information online right here!

Add your URL (add your website or webpage) to google, submit your website to yahoo, ask and others.

Google SERP (search engine results page) summary description length

These are different ways of saying:
google description character limit
google search results paragraph listing
description under link from google search
summary length on search results

Maximum Characters for Meta Tag Description in Google SERP :
155 characters can be shown on Google’s summary of your web page depending upon the word boundary and where it’s truncated.
Google will grab description text from the web page if it does not “like” the Meta tag supplied one, according to Susan Moskwa talking about Meta Descriptions somewhat vaguely, (works at Google but in WA). I think the total character limit is 155 characters, sometimes as short as 145.

This description of your webpage is shown in google directly underneath your page title. Whether the text is grabbed from your webpage or from your Meta Description, it will be cut off at 155 characters.

If you have a situation where google cannot see or get any text from your website, such as a website made with Flash, then your meta tag for description is vital, because you will have nothing under your link which provides no compelling reason for anyone to click on your link. Google has been working on specifically reading this tag in the case of Flash, otherwise, it’s the case of the previous sentence, worthless.

HTML code length: (this is not the length shown on the SERP summary, it’s just what is indexed by Google)
It has been noted that Google places most emphasis on indexing the first 150 words on the webpage (counting code in the html), recommended to place Javascript and CSS in a separate file or at the end of the page.

Maximum Characters for Meta Tag Keywords:
For Google? Useless. Most search engines now ignore this Meta Tag.
If you have a situation where google cannot see or get any text from your website, such as a website made with Flash, then your meta tag for keywords is vital, because you will have nothing in the search engine index for keywords other than your domain name and page titles!

For other search engines, 255 characters is a good number. Don’t stuff the keywords more than 3 times is thought to be safe.

Another thing to note is that the Meta Tag for Description has no bearing on your website’s standing on a search. It’s only for humans to read a summary to determine whether they want to click on your link.

There is speculation that it is used to determine the uniqueness of a page, I have doubts about that.

Which is more important, with www or without?

www.mysite.com vs. mysite.com
You should use a 301 redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com to avoid duplicate content penalty from google (probably not though according to google engineers) and google prefers the www address to be canonical, but you can make any of your URLs the canonical one such as:

• mysite.com
• www.mysite.com
• mysite.com/index.html
• www.mysite.com/index.html

A 302 redirect is temporary, and a 301 redirect is permanent. An authoritative writeup of Canonicalization and 301 vs. 302 redirects can be found at Matt Cutts blog who works at Google as a webspam expert.

Google will handle a 301 redirect by putting the URL that is redirected to into their index. So if someone searches for a term on your website, Google will show the one Canonical URL.

It is important that you setup the redirect first before publishing your website and certainly before adding your URL to Google. Google’s search index may not allow your non www URL to drop out of their index for as long as 6 months. If you do not have a redirect setup and do not want to you can also fix the multiple domain problem by using Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have your account setup then you go to “Dashboard -> Tools -> Set preferred domain”

Duplicate content is determined by a page hash algorithm at Google. The common guess is that Google may penalize your website if you have more than 2 URLs containing the same page content. If you do need to have several URLs it would be a good idea to point all the non canonical ones to point to the one you want to market and publish via 301 redirects.