Coming hot off the heels of last week’s news that Google has increased the widths of title tags and descriptions, is a new report by Jennifer Slegg who says Google has now increased the title tags on mobile search results as well. Not only have title tags been expanded on mobile, they’ve been expanded even more than they have on desktop.
On mobile, site owners now have around 78 characters to work with in their title tags. It’s actually eight characters more than the length of the new desktop title tags which come in at around 71-71 characters.
With seemingly no consistency between the title tag lengths now on mobile and desktop, how do SEOs decide which length of titles to implement on their websites? I have reached out to Google asking for more details about whether or not this is just a test or if it is permanent, and they have yet to respond
What it really boils down to is: how much traffic are you getting on mobile versus desktop? If mobile is the greater driver of traffic for you, then optimizing based on mobile title tag lengths might be the best option if you wish to take advantage of the extra characters.
Still, it’s important to note that you should be careful before making any drastic changes until it’s known for sure whether not not these changes to mobile and desktop title tags are here to stay.
