As an Internet Marketer who spends a lot of time in optimizing web sites, I have to keep testing search engine ranking methodologies to keep abreast of the latest changes by the search engines. In this test I wanted to try and debunk the whole "60 character maximum" for page titles. What I did was to create two new pages with two totally different page titles that varied in length. Each page had a meta description tag, but did not contain the targeted keywords. The pages also did not have any content. Each page was linked from the home page of an aged domain.
For Link A we had a 72 character page title (with spaces) and for Link B 76 character page title. Link A had the targeted keyword at position 62 within the character string (with spaces). Link B had the targeted keyword at position 66 within the character string (with spaces). At position 60 in the Link A page title we had a character and for Link B we had a space. Now this is where it gets interesting. Only Link B targeted word was picked up by Google, but was not found in Yahoo or Bing. Link A targeted term was never indexed. Clearly Google is going past this 60 character limit and ranking the page for keywords beyond this so called "character limit".
When looking closer at the two page titles we noticed that the biggest difference between them was that at character position 60 one had a space and the other had a defined character. More testing will be done to see if indeed the space at the 60 character position does "unlock" the indexing for keywords. Stay tune!