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
-
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
Weirdist Meta Description I've Seen in a SERP
For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for. I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more. The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not? I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford1 -
Doubts with URL's structure
Hi guys i have some doubts with the correct URL structure for a new site. The question is about how show the city, the district and also the filters. I would do that: www.domain.com/category/city/disctict but maybe is better do that: **www.domain.com/category/city-district ** I also have 3 filters that are "individual/colective" "indoor/outdoor" and "young/adult" but that are not really interesting for the querys so where and how i put this filtters? At the end of the url showing these: **www.domain.com/cateogry/city/district#adult#outdoor#colective ** ? Well really i don't know what to do with the filters. Check if you could help me with that please. I also have a lof of interest in knowing if maybe is better use this combination **www.domain.com/category-city or domain.com/category/city **and know about the diference. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarmoscatt0 -
Best solutions when homepage won't rank in Google?
My homepage (www.LeatherHideStore.com) will not rank for my keywords in Google - with Google mostly pulling product pages and some categories for serp results. In contrast, my homepage consistently shows for Yahoo and Bing with exceptions where a category is a better match for the keyword. In other words, it is working exactly as it should in Yahoo and Bing. After a year of this frustration I just upgraded to a new site on Magento Community and surprise, the same problem! The SEO moz analyzer has flagged significant duplicate content issues which I think is at the heart of my problem. I have asked my developer to address these but let's just say that customer service is not his forte. I am even starting to doubt he knows what to do although the site appears is well done. Given that it is a brand new site and duplicate content in Magento is to be expected (from what I have now read), I am deeply discouraged that my developer did not or could not plan for this so here I am again! Can anyone give me guidance on what to do? I have read a lot about canonicalization and it seems complicated especially if you have 1000 duplicate page titles. I have seen that there are some extensions (i.e. Ultimate SEO Suite by aheadWorks) for Magento that claim to be able to solve duplicate content problems but I am really just grasping at straws and do not have the confidence or skills to implement this on my own. Can anyone please help? Thanks! Hunter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Do different meta titles & descriptions delete the canonical origin?
Hi, hopefully anyone knows something about this case: There is a canonical tag on site "www.xyz.com**/de_de/" **refering to site "www.xyz.com/de-de/". If the meta title and descriptions are different on both sides - is there a problem that google will not pay attention to the canonical tag? Do both sides need the same title and canonical? Thanx for your answers! Cheers Heiko!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | heckert0 -
Reverse Proxys - Lost On It's Purpose To Help Seo
Reverse Proxys - Lost On It's Purpose To Help Seo - read an article on seomoz check link below. When should we use this reverse proxy and is it really worth the trouble at all ? Why create subdomains vs subfolders when organizing different sections of the website ? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | helpwanted0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440