Fixing Bing's 'Title Too Long' Without Duplicate Titles

Bing Webmaster Tools' recommendations page showed a high-severity error: "Title too long". Bing wants page titles under 70 characters. The pages it flagged all had something in common, and so did the fix.

Where the extra length came from

Like many sites, this one adds the site name to every page title through a template in the root layout:

title: {
  default: "Sandeep Kumar Chaudhary — Full Stack Software Developer",
  template: "%s · Sandeep",
},

The suffix " · Sandeep" is only 10 characters. But I measured every blog title on the site, and that suffix pushed 1,684 titles past 70 characters. Of those, 343 were too long even without the suffix.

The obvious fix that backfires

My first instinct was to keep only the part before the colon. "Postgres Connection Pooling With PgBouncer and PgCat: Interview Questions to Expect in 2027" would become "Postgres Connection Pooling With PgBouncer and PgCat". Short, clean and readable.

Then I checked what it does across the whole site. Many articles share a lead phrase and differ only after the colon:

• "Topic X: Interview Questions to Expect"
• "Topic X: A Developer Walkthrough"
• "Topic X: Mistakes Teams Make and How to Avoid Them"

Cutting at the colon turns all three into "Topic X". Duplicate titles are a worse problem than long ones, because search engines can no longer tell the pages apart.

The function that worked

The rule I settled on has three steps, tried in order:

1. If the title plus the suffix fits in 70 characters, use it as is.
2. Otherwise, if the title alone fits, drop the suffix.
3. Otherwise, cut at a word boundary, remove any trailing connecting words, and add an ellipsis.

const MAX_TITLE_LENGTH = 70;
const TITLE_SUFFIX = " · Sandeep";
const TRAILING_STOPWORDS = new Set([
  "a", "an", "and", "as", "at", "by", "for", "from", "in", "into", "is", "of",
  "on", "or", "the", "to", "vs", "with", "your",
]);

export function fitTitle(title: string): string | { absolute: string } {
  const t = title.trim();
  if (t.length + TITLE_SUFFIX.length <= MAX_TITLE_LENGTH) return t;
  if (t.length <= MAX_TITLE_LENGTH) return { absolute: t };
  const words = t.slice(0, MAX_TITLE_LENGTH - 1).split(" ");
  words.pop(); // the last word may be cut mid-way
  while (
    words.length > 1 &&
    TRAILING_STOPWORDS.has(words[words.length - 1].toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z]/g, ""))
  ) {
    words.pop();
  }
  return { absolute: `${words.join(" ").replace(/[\s,:;.?!–—-]+$/, "")}…` };
}

In Next.js, returning { absolute: "..." } from a page's metadata skips the layout's title template, which is how the suffix gets dropped for long titles.

Cutting at a word boundary keeps the distinguishing words after the colon whenever there is room, which is what keeps sibling articles unique. Dropping trailing words like "for" and "with" stops titles from ending mid-thought, as in "…Ready for…".

Only the title tag changes

The shortened text is used only for the <title> tag. Everything else keeps the full title:

• the visible H1 heading on the page
• the Open Graph and Twitter titles used in social previews
• the headline in the article's structured data

Readers and social platforms still see the complete title. Only search result listings see the shorter version, and those would have been truncated anyway.

Test against every real title

Before deploying, I ran the same logic over all 5,740 post titles on the site and checked two numbers:

Check	Before	After
Titles over 70 characters	1,684	0
Longest title	107	70
Duplicate titles	0	0

The duplicate count is the important one. A shortening rule that creates duplicates trades one warning for a worse problem. After deploying, I told Bing about the 1,684 changed pages through IndexNow so it would recrawl them sooner.

The takeaway

If Bing flags long titles, look at your title template first. A short suffix multiplied across every page is usually the cause. Fix it with a rule rather than by hand, keep the full title everywhere except the title tag, and test the rule against every real title for length and for uniqueness.