Meta descriptions for subpages in the SERPs

[themegroup]

Hey Mozzers!

Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Nick.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Nick,

I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html

This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

[themegroup]

Thanks guys. I thought that may be the case as all the ones I've seen have been cut. Is there even a set character count, as I could potentially write one that would at least look neat if cut early? Or does it depend from search to search?

As you say, this seems like something they maybe should look at, because while you would undoubtedly lose real estate by cutting all meta descs, you also lose a chunk by having your call to action cut, often in nonsensical or messy ways (I'm aware that this can happen anyway, but anything we can do to minimise this is always welcome!)

Thanks again!

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Marty is correct there is no way of currently doing this, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't out soon, as they are always trying to get a better user experience for their users.

I will ask Google later this week and let you know what they happen to say, I will keep you updated as soon as I find out

[mosquitohawk]

Hi Nick,

Unfortunately at this time there isn't a way to specify a shorter meta description.  The only way to achieve what you're looking for would be to shorten all meta descriptions for sub-pages but that means you'd lose a lot of real estate if it showed up in a normal SERP.