But what does this mean?
We’re all aware of the length of meta descriptions – the snippets of information we see in Google Search – but how important are they and do people even pay attention to them?
Previously, the maximum length was limited to 160 characters. Google has now confirmed that the length of descriptions has been increased to 230 – this is meant to provide more descriptive snippets. More description of content can encourage clickthroughs and more organic traffic if the content is engaging.
In a recent article by Search Engine Land, Google stated:
We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.
Advice my Moz’s Rank Fishkin tells SEOs to:
- Make a priority list of the most important landing pages by search traffic
- Reoptimize those page meta descriptions for the longer limits