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Online Title and Description meta tag checker for Google, Facebook and Twitter

Written 1st Dec 2013

These online meta tag length checkers help you identify the optimum and maximum length of text to use for best presentation by Google, Facebook, and Twitter.Meta Tag Tips explains why the limits used by these tools were chosen. Google et al do modify their page layouts; you can override the current default limits in Tool Settings. Its is a simple cut and paste to alter the Google Title width check (you don’t need to know the current pixel limit).Please read the tool notes (bottom of the Settings Tab).

Key for highlights:
Maximum Length/Character Count: probably okaymay be okaytruncation area
Pixel Width: probably okay probably Truncated


Search Engines: pixel width and maximum number of characters for Title and Description length.


Meta Description and Titles character lengths optimised for use by Google should also work well with Bing and Yahoo.

Google Title:

<title></title>


Google Description:

Short Description Tick this if you are using Google authorship markup, or you know that Google will display other additional information. See Meta Tag Tips

<meta name="description" content="" />


Check your Facebook OG (Open Graph) Tag Lengths


One official FB page indicates description should be 200 chars or fewer; however tests show it’s likely that 300 characters will be displayed (see Meta Tag Tips). The Facebook OG Description Checker identifies chars 201 to 300 as “likely to be displayed” (it may depend on the type of Facebook page).

FB Title:
<meta property="og:title" content="" />


FB Description: (target length + 100 chars “bonus text” – see FB Meta Tag Tips)

<meta property="og:description" content="" />


Twitter Cards


At the time of writing Twitter Documentation states that the maximum sizes for Title and Description are 70 & 200 characters respectively.

Twitter Title:
<meta name="twitter:title" content="" />


Twitter Description:

<meta name="twitter:description" content="" />

Fine tune online tool settings:
If you are aware of changes to the way Google, FB, or Twitter display Title and Description tag information; you can alter the settings here. You don’t even need to know Google’s latest pixel width – all you need to do is copy and paste a full width title from its results. Please comment below if you think I need to change the default settings.

New settings will only be applied to new or modified text input in the checking tools.

Length Checker Settings

Google Description:

Target Character Count:  

Description length may be reduced if Google inserts other information e.g. publication date and your picture (if you are using authorship mark-up).
Short Description target:


Google Title:

The tool compares your Title’s pixel width against a full width Title copied (Nov 2013) from Google search results.

You can ensure the width check is up to date by copy and pasting one yourself from Google (see “Notes” below).
Full width sample Title:

copy the font used for Title from Google’s CSS (must be exact and same case).
Title font used by Google: (“arial” in Nov 2013)


Facebook:

Target Character Count:     Title     Description


Twitter:

Target Character Count:     Title     Description

Online Tool Notes:

Like similar tools, those here provide a rough indication of whether text truncation will occur. Google may use all, part, or none of your text e.g. it may include your site name in its snippet heading reducing the space available for your title. The space allocated by Google et al may change if they alter their own page layouts. These issues are covered in the Meta Tag Tips.

“Intelligent Replacement”:

Multiple spaces are removed and “&amp;” is converted to “&” before character counting and width checking. The converted character string is displayed as the highlighted text – if you cut and paste this from the tool for use on your page then you will need to convert “&”s back to “&amp;”‘s.

Why use a Heading/Title from Google results for comparison?

Any heading displayed in Google’s results must fit within the pixel width limit (as any truncation occurs before it is displayed). So the tool will “know” whether your text will fit by comparing it with a full width “sample” title copied from actual Google search results.

You can “update” the tool without needing to know the actual pixel width limit currently applied by Google. Do your own Google search today, and copy a full width title from the results into Tool settings above. This sample will then be used for width comparison.

4 Comments

  1. Bruce

    Thanks
    But can you tell me the maximum display meta description limit in bing ?

    • AW

      I’ve not done any testing, but according to Bing’s own guidelines ( http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a )

      Descriptions – unique, relevant, grammatically correct, roughly 160 or fewer characters.
      Titles – unique, relevant, 65 characters or so long.”

      Apparently, like Google, Bing now limits title by pixel width. ( blog.powermapper.com/blog/post/Page-Title-Length-for-Search-Engines.aspx )

      So as I said – if they are good for Google they will usually work well for Bing/Yahoo.

    • AW

      P.S. some advice: I’ve changed your name to “Bruce” as Google considers commenter Names which are websites to be spammy. There is a separate form field for your website link (which you completed) and this is added as the link for your name – hover over your name and you will see it links to your website.

  2. Yann de Champlain

    Thanks. Nice tools.

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