Dynamic Meta Tags

Overflow. A pattern like {term} — SEO Glossary | Brand has 22 fixed characters, leaving about 38 for the variable part before Google's ~60-character cut. "CLS" fits comfortably; "Search Engine Results Page" does not, and what gets truncated is the brand, then the qualifier, then the subject itself. This site shipped a 94-character glossary title from exactly this pattern.

Sameness. The opposite failure is a template whose output barely varies — Buy {product} online at the best price across four thousand products produces four thousand titles that differ by one noun. Search engines treat that as the duplication it is, and rewrite them.

The fix for overflow is to treat every part except the subject as optional, and emit the most complete version that fits. In order: subject + qualifier + brand, then subject + brand, then subject + qualifier, then the bare subject.

That way a short subject keeps the full framing and a long one keeps the thing the page is actually about — which is the part you can never afford to lose. If even the bare subject overflows, the right response is to shorten the source data, not to truncate mid-word: a title cut mid-word reads as broken in the results.

fitTitle({ subject: term, qualifier: 'SEO Glossary', brand: 'SlapMyWeb' })
// "CLS — SEO Glossary | SlapMyWeb"          (30 chars, full framing)
// "Search Engine Results Page | SlapMyWeb"   (38, qualifier dropped)

Most frameworks support a title template — a site-wide pattern such as %s | Brand that wraps whatever a page supplies. It is genuinely useful, and it interacts badly with a helper that also appends the brand.

The result is Page Title | Brand | Brand, which is both wrong and long, and it is invisible in the editor because each half looks correct on its own. Whichever layer owns the brand, only one of them may add it: either the helper returns an absolute title that bypasses the template, or it returns the bare subject and lets the template do the work.

This site shipped that exact bug on 69 pages before a crawl caught it.

Titles fail by overflowing; descriptions fail by being generic. Google rewrites a meta description more often than it uses one, and the version it writes is drawn from the page — so a templated description that says nothing specific is simply discarded.

A description earns its place by containing something the template cannot generate: the actual number, the actual finding, the specific phrasing of the query. Compare {product} prices and reviews is a placeholder; {product} scored {n}/100 across {checks} checks — see what it failed is a reason to click.

Where the source data is too thin to produce that, the honest answer is to compose from what exists and accept a shorter description rather than padding it to a character target.