The conventional wisdom in the SEO community for years has been that Google only uses the first 60 – 70 characters of the title tag. This wisdom is so conventional that tools such as Yoast and All in One SEO Pack even warn about going beyond this limit.
If you Google the term “length of title tag google” you’ll see the first listing is Moz that tells you what the DISPLAY limit is for Google. But, many people and companies, over time, have conflated the display limit with the usability limit.
For years, I’ve used title tags longer than the “recommended” limit simply because it works. For local SEO, if I want to get my keywords in the title tag including various cities, this, in itself, is a recipe for long title tags.
A couple of years ago, Charles T. on Pages SEO Magazine developed an interesting test to check out the usability limits for title tags (see the link below).
Search Engine Journal has also talked about this issue recently, “Nobody at Google has ever said that the 40 to 70 character limits are what Google’s ranking algorithms are limited to indexing for ranking purposes. So it does not make sense to accept the advise for limiting the title tag to 70 characters for ranking purposes when that recommendation is based on what is displayed.”
There you have it. Another SEO myth has been debunked. Now comes the scramble in the SEO community, especially with the tools, to update this information.
Citations
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-title-tag-length/400682/
https://www.pagesseomagazine.com/blog/seo-mythbusting-how-deep-does-google-read-into-the-title-tag
