HTML Title Tag Length and Keyword Phrase Separators!

Yes.   I know…  It’s “title element”, not “title tag”.  But this is a test, and I figured, “Hey! If I can get some free long tail traffic then great!”

There was a debate going on today on one of the SEO forums regarding the title element.  So I’ve decided to try to prove or disprove what is being discussed there.

What was being discussed?

The post started out discussing which character is best for separating multiple keyword phrases used in the <title> element.  The original poster asked whether comma (,), pipe (|), or ampersand (&) would be the best separator.  My response was as follows:

All punctuation from the <title> (and link text for that matter) typically gets stripped before it’s evaluated for relevant keywords. So it shouldn’t matter which punctuation character you use to separate your keyword phrases.

I used to use the pipe symbol (‘|’) but prefer to use hyphens (‘-’) now.

After more discussion I then went on to say:

So:

<title>Keyword Phrase1 – Keyword Phrase2 – Keyword Phrase3</title>
<title>Keyword Phrase1 | Keyword Phrase2 | Keyword Phrase3</title>
<title>Keyword Phrase1 , Keyword Phrase2 , Keyword Phrase3</title>
<title>Keyword Phrase1 : Keyword Phrase2 : Keyword Phrase3</title>
<title>Keyword Phrase1 / Keyword Phrase2 / Keyword Phrase3</title>

Are all going to likely be seen as:

<title>keyword phrase1 keyword phrase2 keyword phrase3</title>

once the <title> has been normalized. By normalized I mean all punctuation/special characters removed and converted to lower case.

Then someone answered the original poster’s question with:

I suggest that the comma would be better for separating the keywords in title.
Using comma can take less character spaces than other two.
Google search engine may consider the first 66 chars in webpage title and
yahoo search engine may consider the first 100 to 120 chars.
Title length can vary according to the different search engines.
Using proper phrase of title will yield you better results.

The responder seemed to imply that Google doesn’t consider anything after position 66 of the title when ranking a page.  And that Yahoo ignores everything after position 120.  I then had to respond with:

What gets displayed in the SERPs and what the search engines “consider” in their [ranking] algorithm are two totally different things.

Google and the other search engines almost without a doubt are looking at the entire <title> when ranking the page regardless of whether it’s 10 characters in length or 150 characters in length. Google simply truncates any <title> longer than 65-67 characters in length when displaying it in the SERPs because displaying long <title> elements messes up the formatting of the SERPs especially when you consider that they have to allow for indented listings and Adwords down the right. EVERYTHING Google does down to fonts, font sizes, colors, etc. in their SERPs has been tested a gazillion times to determine what is the absolute best user experience. It’s also possible that they have determined that <title> elements longer than 65 or so characters in length result in a significant drop-off in click throughs.

But this doesn’t mean that when ranking the page they ignore all text in the <title> after position 65-67. I would be willing to be a months salary that they are looking at the entire <title> regardless of length (unless of course, they determine it has been “stuffed” with 100 keywords in which case the entire <title> will likely be ignored and the page possibly placed under penalty).

So I figured before someone took me up on my bet that I had better test my theory.  I’ll post the results here once I have them.