What is your experience so far, with the new Google's Meta Description length up to 320 characters?
-
I updated a few home pages and some landing pages, so far so good!
Although, I wish to know about other experiences, before continue updating. Thanks for your comments!
-
Hi Brooks,
Thanks for the input. It is great to know that it is also working in your ecosystem.
-
Agreed, and sometimes there can be power in a one word title - both for optimization and communication.
-
Agreed.
I don't have any data to prove it's usefulness, but there's something really nice and satisfying about a solid, short, and effective meta description.
-
"really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters"
Thanks!
That's a very interesting thought. Especially if you can do effective "short and punchy" descriptions. If you ramble too long it stinks it up.
-
My agency just launched a new website and in the process updated many of our meta descriptions. Though in optimizing, we realized some really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters.
However, for other pages, such as our services pages, the additional characters gave us a chance to introduce the page, detail what the user can find, and sort of "preview" the call to action.
We've already seen a little increase in CTR for some of our services pages.
Best of luck!
-
Hello William,
Thanks for the input.
I noticed that sometimes Google chooses text randomly. Till now I cannot find a pattern, sometimes from the first paragraph, others from the middle of the page. Although, regarding the pages already SEO optimized, I mean with adecuate page title, meta description and h1, it is showing the written meta description.Best regards
-
Hello,
I am in the process of updating Meta tags and top of page content to try and get relevant text and description tags to show in Google listings. On some of my pages Google uses my Mets "Description" tags and on many others, Google is using the content from the top of the pages. I am not sure how or why which one gets used so I am working on both tags and top of page content.
Best Regards
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
-
SEO's Structuring Your Work Week
Hi I wanted some feedback on how other SEO's structure their time. I feel as though I'm falling into the trap of fire fighting with tasks rather than working on substantial projects... I don't feel as though I'm being as effective as I could be. Here's our set up - Ecommerce site selling thousands of products - more of a generalist with 5 focus areas. 2 x product/merchandising teams - bring in new products, write content/merchandise products Web team - me (SEO), Webmaster, Ecommcerce manager Studio - Print/Email marketing/creative/photography. A lot of my time is split between working for the product teams doing KWD research, briefing them on keywords to use, checking meta. SEO Tasks - Site audits/craws, reporting Blogs - I try and do a bit as I need it so much for SEO, so I've put a content/social plan together but getting a lot of things actioned is hard... I'm trying to coordinate this across teams Inbetween all that, I don't have much time to work on things I know are crucial like a backlink/outreach plan, blog/user guide/content building etc. How do you plan your time as an SEO? Big projects? Soon I'm going to pull back from the product optimisation & try focussing on category pages, but for an Ecommerce site they are extremely difficulty to promote. Just asking for opinions and advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey3 -
Why isn't Google indexing this site?
Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
INEVO, digital agency0 -
Some site's links look different on google search. For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lutfigunduz0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
301's & Link Juice
So lets say we have a site that has 0 page rank (kind of new) has few incoming links, nothing significant compared to the other sites. Now from what I understand link juice flows throughout the site. So, this site is a news site, and writes sports previews and predictions and what not. After a while, a game from 2 months gets 0 hits, 0 search queries, nobody cares. Wouldn't it make sense to take that type of expired content and have it 301 to a different page. That way the more relevant content gets the juice, thus giving it a better ranking... Just wondering what everybody's thought its on this link juice thing, and what am i missing..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?
I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount. However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still. One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed. I finally think I've found a decent path. Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated. Step One: Site Architecture I run an online proofreading & editing service. That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'. For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'. I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future. Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing. Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them. Step Two: Page Anatomy I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages. For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold. The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect. Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan. Step Three: Page Optimization Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages. We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%. You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page. So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports. Step Four: Content/Passive Link Building The bones for our content strategy is in place. We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already. I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels. However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis. I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time. PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five: Step Five: Active Link Building My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content. My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4. Is this poor thinking? Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead? Step Six: Test, Measure, Refine I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts. Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point. However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6. Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here? I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TBiz2 -
Rel canonical element for different URL's
Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline0