META DESCRIPTION LENGTH UPDATE

Their length, 160 or 320 characters, will not positively or negatively affect where you appear in rankings. The most important thing to note is that meta description tags are not a factor for rankings.

If Google dynamically generates your search results snippet, it’s quite possible that only a portion of the meta description would appear as you wrote it.

The content visible on the landing page.

In their statement, Google also referenced how meta descriptions can sometimes be dynamically generated based on:

META DESCRIPTION LENGTH UPDATE

Rather, look at this as an opportunity to update and provide more detail if you feel your descriptions are lacking effectiveness. There’s no need to pump the gas pedal on SEO teams updating all of your meta descriptions to the 320-character limit if you are happy what has been written. So, there’s no need for publishers to suddenly expand their meta description tags, if they feel their current ones are adequate.” However, we never had a limit on meta description tag length before, as we covered earlier this year. We now display slightly longer snippets, which means we might display more of a meta description tag. They should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. “The fact that our snippets have gotten longer doesn’t change the fundamentals of writing a description tag. Check out below for a comparison of two 190west pages, one with the old character limit and one with the extended meta description length.Īs Google wrote in their official statement to Search Engine Land on the meta description length change:

The meta-description, which sits below the URL and meta-title tag, is a way to show users what a page is all about. This extension of the search results snippet means that marketing teams now have double the characters visible in search results page listings. In December 2017, Google confirmed that they have extended the meta description length limit from 160 characters to 320 characters.

Meta description length