Over at the Webmaster World, a new thread has surfaced, according to which, Google is preferring URLs with longer titles and has also been reported that these longer URLs are getting higher rankings as well.
Here are some of the excerpts for the Webmaster World Thread:
“I've seen some long titles performing better than short ones in Google lately. If user search a 3 words keyprase, in most cases you find
1- A long title in first position using those 3 words, some other word/s and again the 3 words or at least 2
And a site not performing first result even with 3 exact words searched.
If we talk about titles only my feeling is Google considers better the long title instead the short one (even when short title hits 100% of keywords 3/3 and long one, not just 4/6) having a lower keyword density.
Ie: search = "blue used widgets"
#1 result "blue used widget bla bla widget" better than
#5 "blue used widget"
Forget what site is better or relevant. I'm talking about title and how Google considers that.â€
“Even as a content analysis factor, I think density is a webmaster's tool but not a direct part of the algorithm. So it wouldn't surprise me that it's not a factor in title tag relevance either.
Do you think there might be some downside to having a title tag that exactly matches a popular query? Seems to me that might be an SEO ploy more than a true content provider's approach.'
“I don't think matching exactly query have a downside itself, but I think Google scores long titles better than short ones even in cases like described: 100% acurracy on searched term, but it's just my guessing.
And agree with seo ploy. But to be honest in competitive search terms even important sites try to get #1 position tweaking title no matter if title does really represent the content fairly.â€
“The rationale for rewarding longer titles could be a better user experience. Instant understanding of a web page's content is more easily possible through a longer title (usually).
I don't know if I believe in keyword density for improved ranking but I suspect spam keyword density could be counted to kick a site down. I suspect Google checks spam anchor text density for its 950 penalty.â€
“Perhaps patent rewards longer titles with a 60-70% density better than less than 4 words 100% density, considering fact keyphrases do not go over 3 words in most cases, to disencourage the seo practice to target exactly what users find, making titles "spammy" instead informational.
I'd love to hear something official about that.â€
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree! I have noticed the yellowpages, servicemagic and other directories, as well as some shopping cart pages with, longer automated titles are beating out well SEO html pages with direct 3 or 4 word titles. For example, do a search for “door installation houston tx”. The top 6 results have very long titles repeating the keywords and the 7th result is exact. Of course incoming links have alot to do with ranking but more and more I’m seeing longer titles on top of the SERPs.
This idea is pretty consistent with some data I have been seeing. I would go so far as to say that the results may be partly determined by where the search engine thinks those words belong in the title, for example -
“Need to buy blue used widgets?”
I have had mixed results with this.
That is very intersting…I will proof it by a domain with the position 1 and let you know.
Regards Kurt
I would say the exact opposit is happening, a directory I have had running the past 4 years that has always been in the top three search results for many keywords is now losing out to other domains, and when I check the titles in these domains it is always a very short title, with exactly the phrase in it, and nothing else, I am going to test this on one of my pages,
will see what happens,