Many of you know that Google SERPs results look wider than usual, since the column width was changed from 512px to 600px. Title sites used to reflect about 60 characters (once it was up to 70, but then the font size was increased), now it's back to about 70 characters.

An average length of words in the English language is 5 characters, which means you can fit up to 14 words in a title. Why was the width of the title 512px? Perhaps of the first 9-inch Macs with a resolution of 512 Ã-- 342 pixels. The desktop screens are constantly expanding and the most popular resolution (according to different sources) is 1366 Ã-- 768 pixels. A minimum popular resolutions is 1024 Ã-- 768. In any case, major companies introduce an interface changes after thorough testing and, most likely, the testing results were great in terms of user experience.

What kind of recommendations can we make to webmasters following this change in Google? Assuming the search engine is your priority, we can recommend the following:



The Moz staff commented on Reddit that they didn't notice material changes in CTR. However, for some sites, the changes can be dramatic, either favorable or unfavorable, depending on the quality of titles.



Check CTR data for different pages of your site before and after that date. You can do that using Google Search Console under "Search Traffic" - "Analysis of the searches," under CTR you need to select the search filter type "Web Only" and choose the desired dates for comparison. You also need to review the change in CTR for different search results and for different pages, the average numbers tells you the numbers in general and not the impact to any particular search result or page - you might miss important data points.
In general, if the changes are favorable, then it's something you can be happy with! Otherwise, check the titles and make changes.



Poor CTR is possible due to various reasons: Non-compliance of the landing page to the user's search intent. Sometimes that can be seen on the title.



For example, a user was looking for reviews of a particular location. In this case, CTR depends on the place of the name in the title - a user might be interested in Omega in Canada or the United States, there is a huge physical distance between the two. CTR is also highly dependent on the phrase "0 comments" - if the user notice it (and it is clearly visible that there are 0 reviews), then there will be no clicks on the first result. Said differently, it is often clear from the titles whether the intent of the search results is satisfied. These signs are often reflected in the ranking formula and the search engines try not to rank high the results that obviously cannot meet the user's search intent. The search engines correct poorly compiled headers, short or very long titles, providing the user with the important information. However, in some cases, the title remains as is. More often than not the webmaster and copywriter test different headers for context advertising guided by their intuition or by their selection criteria. People are different and intuition sometimes fails, for the best results the titles have to be tested by experienced professionals.

When reviewing the titles, at the very least, you have to consult with colleagues to see whether they consider them attractive and optimal for best CTR results.


Titles can be well made, but due to limitations of length or other reasons they will not appear as intended. In this case, you can easily figure out how your CTR changed post May 14th changes. The title may include unnecessary words or numbers. You can easily see that, you do not have to do a lot of manual work. If you are certain that the headers are well written, I recommend to exclude from the results of parsing of the titles those options that include the actual title of the page. That is, you check only the cropped versions or the versions modified by the search engines.



You can also check the meta descriptions, especially if their size was 512px and they made ​​visually attractive by utf-characters. When you change the width the entire imaging could shift. In general, a change in the width to 600px is good, you can use extra words to describe the landing page.

What is your opinion? Share your observations on the subject. Personally, in my experience no one did anything after the change of the algorithm. That wasn't a good thing.