Does Google Now Measure Title Tag Length in Pixels And Not Number Of Characters

I have been reading a great deal about the new change where Google claims to now not count the number of characters in the title tag of a website or content submission post but actually counts the pixels instead. I find this very strange and difficult to comprehend and believe. I have not done tests on this to prove whether this is actually happenning. Has anybody else tested this latest Google development? I would be interested in your findings and comments.

This is very interesting stuff. In an effort to serve the most relevant pages to a search query, Google and other search services have been tweaking how content is displayed in the title tag for sometime now. What actually gets displayed in the results seems to vary between character length and pixel width and depends on certain factors.

• In the past, if your title tag was too long (extended beyond the generally accepted 70-character limit) it would usually be truncated and an ellipsis added to the end. Today it may likely be algorithmically substituted with a shorter title taken from the content.

• Pixel width estimates range from 466px-584px and are influenced by monitor resolution, font size and how differently browsers render font sizes. So a title with lots of thin characters like i, l, t and j, will have more of it displayed in the results than one with many wider characters such as, w, o, a, p and so on.

• Since most blog platforms automatically generate the title tag from the post title, I would suggest routinely creating shorter custom titles for the longer post titles. This way, whichever process Google applies - character length or pixel width - you'd be safe and would be in control of what the searcher sees.

Hermas

I haven't heard about this change but that's very strange, I don't see why they would do that, but I guess if it helps them figure out how to rank pages better than more power to them!