Google made a significant change to their search results this month.  They increased the width of the main column of the search results, and increased the length of the titles displayed in the search results.  And there was also a corresponding increase to the mobile title tag lengths too.

John Mueller was asked in today’s webmaster hangout about why Google made this change, since it was a pretty impactful one for webmasters.

I think what happened is we kind of increased the width of the column of the search results, on some devices at least, and in general we try to match the length to what we’re displaying.  So it’s not that there’s any character count that we could cut off, but rather we try to figure out what fits in here, what can we show and match it like that.

Mueller is right about the character count – there is no exact character count that Google shows, since in Google’s search results spacing is different depending on the individual character used.  Instead, they go by pixel length.

We have detailed information on pixel counts and how this translates into character counts:

• New Title & Description Lengths for Google SEO in Search Results
• New Mobile Title Tag Lengths for Google Search Results

Here is the video: