Meta Description Length is Doubling (Like Twitter)

[TaylorRHawkins]

Just saw this: https://imgur.com/a/KQ0Hf

This is the first time I have ever seen a meta description that long. Ever. I haven't seen any other sites covering this.

That's a 275-character-length description that is not being truncated.

Thoughts? I'm freakin' out.

[Dr-Pete]

Honestly not sure on why it's changing. The short answer is that I think these are more real-time than we usually realize (and only notice when we're staring at one), but a bit odd that it's going from regular to long for the same query. Usually, changes I see are query-dependent. Could indicate that Google is evaluating the content on the page or the intent of the query, but it's hard to say.

[TaylorRHawkins]

Cool, thanks for this article! This is really good to know. Do you know, then, why this might be happening; within an hour of searching that same search string, one of the results gave me 3 different Meta Description tags, while the actual source code meta-tag did not change once.

Screenshots for proof: https://imgur.com/a/hXLWz

[Dr-Pete]

This started a couple of years ago, but it still only happens in isolated cases. See this post:

https://moz.com/blog/i-cant-drive-155-meta-descriptions-in-2015

We believe it's tied to Featured Snippets and Google parsing answers from sites (they share a core engine, even though you may see long snippets on SERPs with no Featured Snippets). In cases where the snippet is deemed highly relevant, Google may present more information. It's not an across-the-board length increase, though. Most snippets are still restricted to the traditional length limits.

[TaylorRHawkins]

I also just noticed that the 275-character-length descriptions are not actual meta-tags in the source code. Google is disregarding those tags and simply grabbing a section of the content and making it their new meta description. This is wild.

[TaylorRHawkins]

In case anyone else wants to try it out for themselves, this is after I searched for "fulfillment center" on Google.