Why cut off some of the question's title in the link?

Question

Take the hyperlink for this question, which is:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/277369/a-terms-of-service-update-restricting-companies-that-scrape-your-profile-informa

which is missing, this entire part of the question: "tion-without-your-permission". This doesn't make sense since the following works too:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/277369/a-terms-of-service-update-restricting-companies-that-scrape-your-profile-information-without-your-permission

Try the above link by clicking this sentence.

So why is part of the question cut-off from the title? I assume that there is some character limit but why is such a limit imposed if this is the case (shorter titles have their whole title in the link)?

Answer 1

Keeping the URL as short as possible is just a SEO best practice.

As mentioned in this blog post:

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.

This isn't a direct problem with Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed, and while these might all add up to only a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).

Emphasis mine - since maximum title length is 150, not limiting the URL to taking up to 80 letters from the title, as SE does, would cause URL with 100+ characters.

So 80 is a compromise: it still makes a readable URL, while not making it too long.