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Title Tags: Maximum Length and Valid Keyword Separators December 2, 2009

I am currently conducting a test on another site to prove or disprove certain opinions I have about the title tag.  There was a discussion that took place on an SEO forum about the topic yesterday.

What was being discussed about title tags?

The original poster started out asking what was the best character to use to separate keyword phrases in the title tag.  His options were comma (,), the pipe symbol (|), or ampersand (&).  

I explained that my experience is that typically none have any real advantage over the others since the title likely gets normalized before it is used in any ranking algorithm.  And by “normalized” I mean that the search engines likely remove all punctuation and special characters from the title and convert it to lowercase.  Although I didn’t mention it in my response, ampersand may be an exception since it has an alternate meaning of ”and”.  I went on to say that I prefer hyphens as a separator, but I didn’t elaborate as to why.

Later in the thread the discussion moved away from the keyword phrase separator to a discussion of the maximum length of the title tag.  A poster implied that Google ignores everything after position 66 of the title and that Yahoo ignores everything after position 100 or 120.   With this i disagreed.  Do I have evidence? Nope… just gut call… common sense.

So I decided to run a little test on the maximum length and keyword phrase separators for a title tag.  I’ll post the results here once the page has been indexed.  There is often no better way to learn SEO free than thru observation and experimentation.