Why Character Limits Matter
Every platform enforces character limits differently, and exceeding them can mean truncated posts, rejected form submissions, or extra SMS charges. Knowing these limits in advance — especially for things like meta descriptions and title tags — also has a direct impact on SEO, since search engines truncate longer text with an ellipsis in search results.
SMS messages are a special case: technically, a single SMS segment holds 160 characters using standard GSM encoding, but using certain special characters or emojis can drop that limit to 70 characters per segment, since they require a different (Unicode) encoding.
Why SEO Limits Matter
- Title tags (60 chars) — Google typically truncates title tags longer than this in search results, potentially cutting off important keywords.
- Meta descriptions (160 chars) — similarly truncated; a well-crafted description within this limit improves click-through rates from search results.
- Social media captions — while not always strictly enforced for SEO, staying within platform limits ensures your full message is visible without a "see more" click.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my SMS character limit show as 70 instead of 160? ▼
Standard SMS uses GSM-7 encoding, allowing 160 characters per message segment. However, using any character outside that basic set (most emojis, accented letters, certain symbols) forces the message into Unicode (UCS-2) encoding, which only allows 70 characters per segment.
Does Google really cut off long meta descriptions? ▼
Yes — while Google sometimes generates its own description from page content regardless of length, when it does use your meta description, anything beyond roughly 155-160 characters (the exact pixel-based cutoff varies) gets truncated with an ellipsis in search results.
Are character limits the same as word limits? ▼
No — character limits count every individual character including spaces and punctuation, while word limits count distinct words regardless of their length. A platform with a "280 character" limit is a stricter constraint than a "280 word" limit, since average words are 4-5 characters long.
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