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#4393 – SEO meta description

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Tuesday, 05 December 2017 21:53 UTC

carolynK

Hi, thank you for the sh404SEF plugin.
I am especially interested in SEO optimazion. The first thing I realized is that the field for meta description allows just 160 letters. Why? In the last years 155 were allowed. But since about one or two months Google changed the rule and now there can many more letters, like 300. Just have a look at the Google results. How can I write more than 160 now?

Best greetings
Carolyn

Wednesday, 06 December 2017 09:01 UTC

wb_weeblr

But since about one or two months Google changed the rule

Not really, the change was effected about 2 weeks ago, and confirmed officially, meaning this is not just a test as they do constantly, only 5 days ago.

Currently, the meta description fields allows 255 characters, so you can go far past 160 characters. The counter is only there as a hint, and will be updated in next official release, probably to around 230 characters, which is the average length displayed by Google after the change. Only Google expanded their description length, so the advice is still valid for other engines. I expect other to follow suites, so like I said, this will be updated.

Importantly, please note that this length extension might be useful for new content, but many times snippet is generated dynamically based on the search query, so spending a lot of time on rewriting older desription is probably not really worth it.

Some webmasters and SEOs may consider updating their meta descriptions, but I don’t believe Google would recommend doing so. The snippets are more often dynamically generated based on the user query and content found in both the meta description and the content visible on the page. If Google is going to go with a longer snippet, it likely will pull that content from the page.

Rgds

Thursday, 21 December 2017 05:34 UTC

system

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