Hi @martychc23,
The pixel counter is a neat idea, but it doesn’t come without flaws. There are two plausible reasons, both of which I’m working on resolving.
Texturizing text
The first is that the title might be beautified/texturized in PHP. So ' becomes ’.
The JavaScript calculation doesn’t account for this. For more information, see issue 227.
Google has variations
Google varies its title and description widths depending on the user agent. For example, mobile devices have less title space.
Recently, Google also applied conditions per page. Some pages have more title-and description space than others, even if it’s the same site, also varying between mobile and desktop.
As you can see, there are many conditions applied. I’m going to see if I can account for this in the 3.1 update, by showing green and orange areas, where orange will be the “might work” zone, and the green zone will be a “definitely work” zone.
I hope this clears things up 🙂
Thread Starter
Anonymous User 14978628
(@anonymized-14978628)
Have you see the Title Tag Check @ Moz?
https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
Don’t know if that will help you in any way?
But it does seem to be quite accurate.
I tested the titles which TSF gave a green bar and an “okay” for being within the character limit, that had cut-off titles in Google on desktop.
The tool correctly showed how those titles looked like in the search results.
Hi @martychc23,
That is useful 🙂 Thanks!
I browsed the code. Oddly, they cut off at 570(+10) pixels while they say throughout the explanatory page it’s 600 pixels. It seems they calculate in the ... with the cut-off point, which is 10 pixels wide.
From this, I learned that Google might cut off early, even if they don’t have to.
I’ll conduct more investigation. Cheers 🙂
Thread Starter
Anonymous User 14978628
(@anonymized-14978628)
From my testing i have confirmed 578 pixels doesn’t get cut off.
So the 570(+10) seems reasonable to me as i was suspecting 580 may be the max limit for desktop.
I can confirm 582 pixels gets cut off.
Thread Starter
Anonymous User 14978628
(@anonymized-14978628)
Forgot to ask, are you aware of any penalties from changing the post title and url in terms of seo?
Hi @martychc23,
It’s difficult to take your science into account as I don’t know what title you’re using. But, it’s good that you’ve found more tools to confirm your data with. Use this to your advantage 😉
For your other questions…
When you change the URL, all backlinks will be lost. You should use a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. With TSF, it’s best to create a new page and set the redirect field in the old one.
When you change the title, there’s little to worry about. You’ll have to “wait and see” to know whether it worked out for the better or not.
When you have any more off-topic questions, I suggest opening another topic 🙂
