How long should a title tag be?

Roughly 50–60 characters. Truncation is by pixel width, near 580px on desktop, so a title in wide characters is cut earlier than a narrow one. Preview it rather than trusting the character count alone.

Do meta descriptions affect rankings?

Not directly. They influence whether people click your result, which is commercially significant, but the description text is not used as a ranking input.

Should every page have a unique description?

Every page you want ranked, yes. Duplicated descriptions across dozens of pages signal templated thin content and are almost always rewritten by the search engine anyway.

What should I do about pages where Google rewrites my title?

Check whether the title is truncated, generic or repetitive across the site. Rewriting it to be shorter and more specific to the page's actual content is the intervention that works most often.

Guides

Title tags and meta descriptions: what still matters

Length limits, rewriting behaviour and a repeatable way to write snippets that survive truncation and earn the click.

By Remi Okafor, Editor, Toolspea · Published 2026-06-30 · Updated 2026-08-09 · 7 min read

Truncation is measured in pixels

Search results cut titles by rendered width, not character count. Around 580 pixels on desktop is the usual limit, which lands near 60 characters of ordinary lowercase text — and considerably fewer if the title is set in capitals or full of wide letters like W and M.

The practical response is to front-load. Whatever distinguishes this page from every other result should appear in the first 40 characters, with brand and qualifiers afterwards where a cut does least damage.

Why your title gets rewritten

Google replaces titles in a meaningful share of results. The common triggers are titles that are truncated, keyword-stuffed, near-identical across a site, boilerplate-heavy, or simply a poor match for the query that surfaced the page.

You cannot force a title to be used, but concise, descriptive, page-specific titles are rewritten far less often than templated ones.

Descriptions are advertising copy

The description is not a ranking factor and has not been one for many years. It is the two lines under your link, competing with nine other results. Write it as a promise: what the reader gets, and what makes this page different from the others on the page.

Leaving it blank means the engine assembles a snippet from body text. That is occasionally better than a weak description and usually worse than a good one.

A repeatable pattern

This template holds up across informational and commercial pages:

Title: Primary topic — qualifier | Brand (aim for 50–60 characters).
Description: what the page contains, who it is for, and the distinguishing detail (150–160 characters).
Avoid repeating the exact title text in the description; use the space for something new.
Check the rendered result in a snippet preview before publishing, on both desktop and mobile widths.

Auditing an existing site

Export titles and descriptions from a crawl, then look for three specific faults: duplicates across pages, missing descriptions, and titles over roughly 60 characters. Those three account for most of the metadata problems on a typical site, and fixing them is mechanical work rather than a strategy project.

Frequently asked questions

Tools mentioned

Meta Tag Generator — Produce title, description, Open Graph and Twitter tags for any page.
SERP Snippet Preview — See how a title and description will truncate in search results.
Word Counter — Live word, character, sentence and reading-time counts.

Keep reading

Everything referenced in this article, plus the hubs and guides that go with it.

Meta Tag GeneratorToolProduce title, description, Open Graph and Twitter tags for any page.SERP Snippet PreviewToolSee how a title and description will truncate in search results.Word CounterToolLive word, character, sentence and reading-time counts.SEO toolsCategory4 browser-based seo tools that never upload your files.Text toolsCategory5 browser-based text tools that never upload your files.How to compress images without visibly losing qualityGuideA practical method for cutting image weight by 80–95% using format choice, sensible dimensions and a quality setting you can defend.robots.txt vs noindex: which one actually keeps a page out of GoogleGuideThe two directives control different things, and using the wrong one is why blocked pages keep appearing in search results.Using the toolsFAQInput limits, supported formats, browser requirements and what to do when a tool behaves unexpectedly.