Meta Description Length

Marketing
1

Hi Friends,
As Google update came in December 2017 that length of the Meta Description tag is increased from 160 to 320 characters.
I updated the meta tags of my website and increased the length to 320 characters.
But now when I search for my keywords Google is again showing meta description only up to 160 characters and showing … later.

Please suggest why this is happening.
Is someone else facing this problem.?
Should I reduce the length of meta tags?

2

Hello, You got a good question here but I would like to clear that meta description length is still 160. Please go to this for more detail: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-it-shortened-search-results-snippets-after-expanding-them-last-december-298196

3

Hi sure.
thank you aanchalkaura.

4

Hi @madschoolbranding and a warm welcome to the forum.

Please supply a link giving details about the increase in meta tag length.

1 Like
7

@John_Betong: the OP is no longer with us, but I can answer that.

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624

There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.

From Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide”:

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. While there’s no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it’s long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

As you can see from the above Google quotes, that is not the case.

1 Like
8

Authoritative sites are always better than arbitrary so-called expert sites.

2 Likes
9

It is always recommendable to use the meta description between 50 to 300.This is the most ideal character limit.The character limit should be in that limit for google to crawl.

10

Where did you get this recommendation from?

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11

Bing recommends a meta description length from 25 to 160 characters.

SEO Explanation Search engine crawlers only show the first 150-160 characters of the description in the search results page, so if a description is too long, searchers may not see all of the text. If a description is too short, the search engines may add text found elsewhere on the page. Note that search engines may show a different description from the one you have authored if they feel it may be more relevant to a user’s search.
Recommended Action Change the description in the tag in the page source to be between 25 and 160 characters in length.

Google does not specify any figures, but Search Console will flag pages where in considers the length to be either too long or too short in “HTML Improvements”, which suggests that they do have a preferred length range.

2 Likes
12

Meta description should be maximum at 160 characters. You should consider reducing your meta description.

13

Meta description should be 160 to 170 character maximum 200 characters

14

What authority to have for giving these figures?

15

As the OP is no longer with us, and people just seem to be quoting random figures without explanation or sources to back them up, I think it’s time to close the thread.

Thanks to those who provided useful replies.

1 Like