What we find · Specimen 04
Title truncates in search: SKU and category names stuffed into the title tag
The product's title tag carries the product name, then the SKU, then every category it belongs to, then the store name. Search results show roughly the first sixty characters. Everything after that is invisible to the searcher and reads as stuffing to the ranking system.
It is the one line of text a searcher sees before deciding whether to click, and it has been handed to the inventory system.
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Specimen 04 · Title truncates in search
example.com › products › trail-jacket-mens
Trail Jacket, Men's - SKU TJ-M-BLK-LG | Outerwear, Jackets, Coats, Shells, Mid…
Everything after the product name is invisible to the searcher and reads as stuffing to the ranking system.
Internal metadata in the title tag, eating the only line of text a searcher actually sees.
The specimen is drawn — our own type, our own palette, an invented product, no screenshot and no store's interface reproduced. It shows what the defect class looks like, not what any storefront looked like.
What a shopper sees
A search result whose title is the product name, a hyphen, a code, a pipe, and a list of words that trails off. Next to it, a marketplace result whose title is the product name and the brand. The shopper clicks the one that looks like it was written for them.
Inside the store the same string lands in the browser tab, in the link preview when the page is shared, and in the breadcrumb. None of those surfaces has room for it either.
Why it happens
On Shopify
The product title itself was written for the warehouse, with the SKU and the variant baked in, and the theme appends the store name. Or the SEO title field was filled by a bulk-edit or an app that concatenates title, vendor, type and tags into one string on every product. Navigation that links to tag-filtered collection URLs concatenates the tag into the collection's title as well, so the page title reads the same phrase three times.
On WooCommerce
An SEO plugin's title template for products was set to include categories, brand and store tagline, and it applies to every product at once. Product names imported from a supplier feed arrive with the manufacturer code in them. A "keyword-rich" tagline added to the site title years ago is appended to every page. Each of these looked sensible on its own; together they produce a hundred-and-fifty-character title.
Check your own store in two minutes
- Search for your own product — Type the product name and your store name into a search engine. Read the title of your result as a stranger would.
- Open the page and read the tab — The browser tab shows the title tag. If it needs the tab to be widened to read, it is too long.
- Check three more, from different categories — A template defect repeats on every page; a data defect repeats on every imported product. Either way you will see the pattern by the fourth page.
- Look at the menu links — On Shopify, a menu item whose URL contains a filter is writing that filter into the page title.
What the fix involves
Set the title template to product name, then store name, and nothing else. Move the SKU to the product page body where a buyer who needs it can find it. Point navigation at clean collection URLs so the filter stops entering the title. Where product names carry manufacturer codes, clean them in bulk from the export rather than one by one.
Effort in the published audits: about one hour for the template and the navigation. Cleaning imported product names is a separate, data-sized job.
Where we found it
Audit No. 001, an outdoor-gear retailer on WooCommerce: the hero product's title tag ran product name, store name, city, state, eight brand names and three service phrases. Audit No. 002, a powersports retailer on Shopify: menu items linked to tag-filtered URLs, and one page title read the same phrase three ways past a hundred characters.
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