What to do about new meta description character limit?
-
Hey Everyone,
So as I'm sure everyone has heard the new meta description limits have been increased and I have been going back and forth with whether or not to update my descriptions for my client's websites. I know that Google is now dynamically generating descriptions based off of content, but is it still beneficial to write longer descriptions as well? Will Google display my longer description now if it is ranking well? Rand Fishkin at Moz and others say that you should and other people, including Danny Sullivan, have said you shouldn't worry about it and leave them at between 150-160. My questions is what should I do? I will be focusing heavily on making sure the site's content is very targeted and relevant for when Google dynamically generates the descriptions, but should I still edit my descriptions manually?
-
Pete at Moz updated his "How Long Should Your Meta Descriptions Be?" post last night:
He says this:
"At the end of the day, I think it comes down to control. For critical pages, writing a good meta description is like writing ad copy — there's real value in crafting that copy to drive interest and clicks. There's no guarantee Google will use that copy, and that fact can be frustrating, but the odds are still in your favor..."Like he says, I think it ultimately comes down to what makes the most sense for that page. For some pages on our website, a very short description seems to suffice. These can be as short as 50 characters. For some of our more "weightier" pages, like our services pages, we try our best to entice the user to click with a true description of what they will find on the page, as well as the action they might be expected to take. These may be around 300 characters. We're pretty confident (Dr. Pete is too) that this is a safe number that won't get cut off, regardless any features or "Jump To" links Google may add to the result.
Cheers!
-
- Crawl entire website and see which descriptions have been updated to the new limit
- Sort pages in order from most important ones to leas important
- Rewrite descriptions that look like this: https://i.imgur.com/UadRJT9.png
- Repeat until all descriptions are updated
-
With this change I saw that Google replaced my meta description by the first x amount of characters of my content. This new text was too random and not inviting people to click. (in my opinion) So I have changed all my meta descriptions to an average of 280 characters, and I already see some result in Google where it displays my new (full) meta description.
So far I'm happy I did...
-
To start, we are rewriting the descriptions for a few dozen pages.
**Which pages? ** Those that have really deep content that pulls in a lot of traffic for long tail keywords of value.
What's the intended result? If we get those frequently-searched keywords into the description they will show in bold text in the SERPs.
**What are the strategies ? **
A) Use those keywords in ways that show we have deeper information for those who click into the site.
B) Associate those keywords with value propositions, urgency, mystery and other triggers to action.
-
Hello everyone!
Personally I think this is too recent. As Danny Sullivan (I think was him) said, we should not go as lunatics trying to re-optimize our meta descriptions.
My advise to everyone that asks about this: Lets give Google a little time ( how about until Q2-18?), so then we will know how is the real impact.
Of course there is a direct metric about the CTR, with longer descriptions snippets the better is the chance to call the attention of the searcher. How ever, we still dont know for sure how Google creates that descriptions.That's just my point of view. I'm more of a cautious person.
Best luck to all.
GR. -
Hello, the description is like the billboard of your search listing where the title tag is the headline. This is your opportunity to tell people reading the search results why they should click on it and visit your site.
Just pretend it was a paid advertisement for a minute and every click cost you five dollars. Optimize the title and descriptions to convey your message and put your best foot forward. If you think every visit is worth a certain amount of money it is easier to see how important they really are.
Best Regards
-
When I was starting in the world of Seo I was really obsessed, with snipped optimization and keyword optimization and so on.
Now I prefer to focus on the content and the user needs.
As I see and understand Google is just trying to give to the user's more specific search results.
If someone asks a question to Google, it will try to give the best answer possible at the first time. If any page, site, fan page or whatever meets those criteria, then Google will put it in the first place. On the other hand, if that page does not meet the search query intent "answer the question" then that page will not be in the first place.
No matter the description, or the on-page optimization, or the schemas.
So I think is very simple, don't waste your time leave your meta description alone and create a good content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage meta title not indexing correctly on google
Hello everyone! We're having a spot of trouble with our website www.whichledlight.com The meta title is coming up wrong on google. In Google it currently reads out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
'Which LED Light: LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared'
when it should be
'LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared | Which LED Light' Last snapshot of the page from google was yesterday (5th April 2016) Anyone got any ideas?
Is all the markup correct in the ?0 -
New Section On Site Worth It?
We have been kicking around this idea for a while now, and I wanted to get the communities honest opinion before we begin building it. So we create a lot of posts on social media showcasing articles we find on SEO, tips and tricks, reviews, etc. We were thinking rather than always linking out to the other sites, we are going to create a section on our site called "From Around The Web" and have brief breakdowns of what was covered, then provide a link to the full article. Most of these would be between 300-500 words, and be optimized around what we were linking to and writing about. So since the content would not be "in-depth" would this hurt us in any way? To me, it doesnt not make sense to send people to the other article right away, when we can summarize it and link to the full articles from our site. (Most people dont want to read a 3000 word article on SEO, especially small business owners who just want the breakdown) Thoughts? Think it will help, or not be useful enough to invest labor in?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
Having problems resolving duplicate meta descriptions
Recently, I’ve recommended to the team running one of our websites that we remove duplicate meta descriptions. The site currently has a large number of these and we’d like to conform to SEO best practice. I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s recent video entitled, ‘Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description’, where he suggests that webmasters use meta descriptions for their most tactically important pages, but that it is better to have no meta description than duplicates. The website currently has one meta description that is duplicated across the entire site. This seemed like a relatively straight forward suggestion but it is proving much more challenging to implement over a large website. The site’s developer has tried to resolve the meta descriptions, but says that the current meta description is a site wide value. It is possible to create 18 distinct replacements for 18 ‘template’ pages, but any sub-pages of these will inherit the value and create more duplicates. Would it be better to: Have no meta descriptions at all across the site? Stick with the status quo and have one meta description site-wide? Make 18 separate meta descriptions for the 18 most important pages, but still have 18 sets of duplicates across the sub-pages of the site. Or…is there a solution to this problem which would allow us to follow the best practice in Matt’s video? Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Rankings Up instantly after publishing new blog article
Hello All, My question is, why did my site rankings go up all of a sudden as soon as I published an article in my blog and it gets indexed (almost immidiately) The rankings increase are the following Keyword 1: from Top 5 to Top 1 Keyword 2: from Top 4 to Top 2 Keyword 3: from Top 16 to Top 3 Keyword 4: from no where to Page 2 (big time keyword) Any ideas or experience on this? When it first happened early this week(i published a new article), my site rankings dropped back after a couple of days. I did the same pattern by pubishing a new article and it went back up again. No personalized result here btw. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onecov0 -
Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We run an established website (mindflash.com) selling online training software. We are getting ready to launch a new section of the site where our users can sell their own online training programs. This will be branded as the 'marketplace'. This section will have a main page, category pages, tag pages, search and individual course pages. In our URL structure, I'd love to target the word 'training courses' but I don't want to neglect the product brand either. Is it better to use /training-courses in the marketplace urls or to use /marketplace? Or is it better to use both like /marketplace-training-courses or /marketplace/training-courses? Option 1: Example main section page: mindflash.com/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/training-courses/software-training Option 2: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/software-training Option 3: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses/software-training Option 4: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses/software-training Which option is better and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
How often do you refresh meta descriptions? And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking?
1. And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking? 2. How often do you refresh meta descriptions? I am not sure whether it's a new feature, but I noticed this little time stamp on one of the search results, it says 1 day ago, and the website ranked quite high. So is there any correlation here? o4JIw.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0