Another discussion today about “how many characters does Google index in Title Tag?”.
Google displays around of 60 characters in results pages.
On google.ro, if we give a search related to this topic, we will find opinions as: title should have around 30, 40-50, 70 characters (spaces included). Even All in One seo Pack for WordPress suggests us that “the most search engines indexes until 60 characters”.
A test made on .com by David Naylor’s team showed that they are minimum 213 characters indexed. But if they are more than that? Let’s test.
This is the plan: we write the post, we add Title Tag of 1000 characters (spaces included), most of them being unique versions so there are no competitors. The text from Title Tag will not be found in post or in the post’s description.
The test was run on the Romanian version of this post: Cate caractere indexeaza Google din Title Tag (test)?
You can see below the title chosen (generated random) of 1000 characters (spaces included). I added as image, so it will not appear in post’s content, so I will know for sure that title tag is responsible for ranking. I searched for the last characters from the title, so I am sure that there are no competitors for this search.
After few days (4 days exactly), I made a research after the last combination from the post and here is what it appeared:
So, Google does index minimum 1000 characters (spaces included). If there is wise to use all of them …. that’s another story. 
Update (October 1st, 2011)
After a short discussion on http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday I realized that it would have been wise to let the title tag as it was. I did update the title tag of the initial post test Cate caractere indexeaza Google din Title Tag (test)?. After the title will be indexed again, we will be able to search again with intitle operator to see if the test has the same results.
[...] have shown that Google will index anywhere between 150, one person even showed that they will index over 1,000 characters, and I will link to these experiments in the post. But does this mean that you should use all of [...]
It is a very interesting test!!! I always doubted about the number of characters that can be in title tag and here is the answer for me. Thanks a lot !!!
@Ann I started this test only because I think that Google indexes all the characters you add in the title tag. Maybe they do have a character limit for this tag, but I doubt.
V may give a 80 characters as a title tag
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added”
checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four e-mails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove people from that service?
Many thanks!
Seems that your email address is not working. As soon as you can make it work – please drop me an email.
Thanks for one’s marvelous posting! I definitely enjoyed reading it, you will be a great author.I will make sure to bookmark your blog and will come back later on. I want to encourage you continue your great posts, have a nice morning!