Meta Description Lengths?
-
Hi All,
I've heard so many different opinions on meta description lengths. What's your general consensus? Some say up to 250 characters, Moz says around 150-160 characters, and Google typically truncates to no more than, say 160 characters.
One might say then that clearly you shouldn't go above what Google shows, but my experience shows that it's not a deal breaker at all for ranking.
Thoughts?
-
Hit the nail on the head here! It's all about improving click through rates, and enticing the user to click through, after reading an enticing meta description
-
-
Official Google does truncate at around 160 so i usually shoot for that. I mean after all if our goal is to always do things that are useful for the web, I have to question how useful it is to go beyond what Google will use in search, but there is no penalty for going over 160 characters.
-
Meta descriptions play an important role whether or not they are counted in ranking. When done well, they can cause a searcher to click on your result over the others. If the clever description you write for your page is too long, it will get truncated or Google might choose to show something else entirely (which it might do anyway, especially depending on the search term). I like to use this tool when writing page titles and descriptions: http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html It allows you to see what your result might look like in Google's serps (it uses 70 characters as the allowed title length and 156 as the allowed description length).
-
Makes sense guys. Thank you.
-
I would only do this if it sits with the general theme of what is being said. Don't just try to make it fit just so it's in there.
-Andy
-
We generally keep our branding in the page titles as the suffix and focus on keyword matching in the meta descriptions.
-
Thanks, guys.
On that note, do you worry about branding in the meta description for non-brand queries?
-
We always stick with around 155 characters with the most important information in the first 60. This is because if Google decides to show big sitelinks, your meta descriptions will get truncated even further, thus showing less characters.
You are correct that meta descriptions have no weight on ranking. But, CTR does and this can be directly impacted by your meta description. Therefore, they continue to be worth your time to do them well. I personally don't think spending time writing over 155 characters is worth it because the chances of Google displaying these extra characters (at least in a way that will appear clean) is slim. You are better off letting them determine what to show based on user query and page content at that point.
-
Err on the side of caution where there is any doubt at all. No-one really know if Google use this in some capacity, so take no chances and keep it all clean.
-Andy
-
Thanks, Andy.
They say that the meta description isn't necessarily looked at, but Matt Cutts says it's important to have them. So, I opt to have unique ones for my most important pages at least: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308339/Matt-Cutts-Create-Unique-Meta-Descriptions-for-Your-Most-Important-Pages
You're right...maybe we shouldn't go above 160 characters? All else...?
-
Google say they don't use this in SEO at all, and if we believe that is plays no part, then you have a maximum of 150-160 characters to play with. If you go over this, it doesn't get shown anyway, so all you are doing is creating content that will never be read, or that 'might' get seen as an attempt to keyword spam.
Stick to the threshold and you can't go wrong
-Andy
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
-
Duplicate Content Product Descriptions - Technical List Supplier Gave Us
Hello, Our supplier gives us a small paragraph and a list of technical features for our product descriptions. My concern is duplicate content. Here's what my current plan is: 1. To write as much unique content (rewriting the paragraph and adding to it) as there is words in the technical description list. Half unique content half duplicate content. 2. To reword the technical descriptions (though this is not always possible) 3. To have a custom H1, Title tag and meta description My question is, is the list of technical specifications going to create a duplicate content issue, i.e. how much unique content has to be on the page for the list that is the same across the internet does not hurt us? Or do we need to rewrite every technical list? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Does Google want contact numbers in the meta description?!
Reading up it seems like there's complete free reign to enter what you want in the meta description and they are not considered a direct ranking signal However I have added contact numbers to the meta descriptions for around 20 reasonably high ranking pages for my company and it seems to have had a negative effect (taken screen grabs and previous rankings) More strangely when you 'inspect' the page the meta description features the desired number yet when you find the page in the serps the meta description just does not feature the number (page has been cached and the description does not carry on) I'm wondering whether such direct changes are seen as spam and therefore negative to the page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing1 -
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Unique meta descriptions for 2/3 of it, but then identical ending?
I'm working on an eCommerce site and had a question about my meta descriptions. I'm creating unique meta descriptions for each category and subcategory, but I'm thinking of adding the same ending to it. For example: "Unique descriptions, blah blah blah. Free Overnight Shipping..". So the "Free Overnight Shipping..." ending would be on all the categories. It's an ongoing promo so I feel it's important to add and attract buyers, but don't want to screw up with duplicate content. Any suggestions? Thanks for your feedback!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeffbstratton0 -
Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?
I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?
Hi, Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore. There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow. There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts? thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow robots
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. PSS: another reason why this needs looking at is because search engines won't be able to make an interpretation of these pages (until they have been cleaned up and fleshed out with unique content) which could result in bad ranking of the pages which could conclude to my users not being satisfied, so over and above the SEO factor, usability of the site is being looked at here as well, I don't want my users to land on these pages atm. If they navigate to it via the filters then awesome because they are defining what they are looking for with the filters. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0