This issue checks whether the page's <title> tag is between 50 and 60 characters long.

This issue checks whether the page's <title> tag is between 50 and 60 characters long.

Search results give a title roughly that much horizontal space. Below 50 the space is left unused, and a very short title is usually a vague one — Products, Blog, Home | Acme are all technically titles and none of them describe anything. Above 60 Google truncates the title with an ellipsis, and everything after the cut is never read.

Both directions are the same issue. A page can only ever be one of them, and the report tells you which, by how much, and what the current title is.

For this check to pass:

• The title must be present (that is issue #300)
• It must be between 50 and 60 characters

This check is only about length. Duplicate titles across pages are issue #39.

Example: Headphones is 10 characters and fails as too short. Buy Wireless Noise-Cancelling Over-Ear Headphones Online With Free Shipping | Acme Audio Store is 93 and fails as too long. Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones — 30hr Battery | Acme is 57 and passes.

A title outside the recommended length affects:

• Rankings: The title is a primary relevance signal. A two-word title gives the search engine almost no vocabulary to match a query against. Google also rewrites titles it judges unsuitable, and length is one of the triggers — a rewritten title is chosen by an algorithm optimising for the query, not for your positioning.
• Click-through rate: A short, generic title looks interchangeable with every other result. An over-long one loses its tail to truncation, and the tail is usually where the brand and the differentiator live.
• Duplicate content: Short titles collide. Ten category pages titled Products are hard to tell apart and encourage a search engine to consolidate them.
• User experience: The browser tab shows even less than the search result does, so a truncated title is harder to find among open tabs.
• AI Search / AEO: Answer engines use the title as a first-pass summary of what a page covers. A vague one gets skipped; a padded one dilutes the signal.

Fixing this improves your SEO health score by making each page's most heavily weighted text both specific and fully visible.

The report tells you which direction the title is out by and how many characters.

If the title is too short

1. Add the distinguishing detail. Answer "which one?" — Headphones becomes Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones.
2. Add a qualifier people search for: a key spec, an audience, a location, or a year — — 30hr Battery, for Small Teams, in Manchester, (2026 Guide).
3. Append the brand. Primary Topic | Brand usually adds the last 10-15 characters on its own.
4. Do not pad with keywords. Repeating a term to reach a character count reads as spam. If a page genuinely has nothing more to say, the page is probably thin, not the title.

If the title is too long

1. Cut the filler. Buy, Online, Best, Official, Welcome to and - Home almost never earn their characters.
2. Shorten or drop the brand suffix. | Acme Audio Store is 19 characters; | Acme is 7.
3. Remove duplicated words, usually a remnant of a template joining a category and a product name.
4. Move detail to the meta description, which has 150-160 characters to work with.

Either way

• Front-load what matters. Whatever survives truncation should be the words someone searched for.
• Fix the template. Length problems are usually systemic — one template producing {{category}} where it should produce {{category}} — {{qualifier}} | {{brand}}, or one that only overflows on longer product names.

1. Too short — bare category name

Problem — 10 characters, 40 below the minimum:

<title>Headphones</title>

Fixed — 57 characters:

<title>Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones — 30hr Battery | Acme</title>

2. Too long — template concatenating too many segments

Problem — 93 characters, 33 above the maximum. A reader sees roughly Buy Wireless Noise-Cancelling Over-Ear Headphones Online Wi…:

<title>Buy Wireless Noise-Cancelling Over-Ear Headphones Online With Free Shipping | Acme Audio Store</title>

Fixed — 52 characters, with shipping moved to the meta description:

<title>Wireless Noise-Cancelling Over-Ear Headphones | Acme</title>

3. Too long — site-wide tagline on every page

Problem — 84 characters, where the last 33 are identical site-wide:

<title>Contact Us | Acme Audio — Professional Sound Since 1994</title>

Fixed — 54 characters, specific to the page:

<title>Contact Acme Audio Support | Returns and Repairs</title>

1. Fetches the raw HTML and parses the <head>.

2. Reads the title text. If there is no title at all, nothing is reported here — that is issue #300, and reporting both would describe the same page twice.

3. Counts the characters in the title text.

4. Decides. The issue is raised when the count falls below 50 or above 60. The finding records the actual length, which bound was crossed, the difference in characters, and the title itself — so the report states the current length, whether it is too short or too long, and the required range, rather than a generic warning.

Because a title cannot be both too short and too long, this is a single issue rather than two. Only one direction is ever reported for a given page.