Meta Description Lengths?
-
Hi All,
I've heard so many different opinions on meta description lengths. What's your general consensus? Some say up to 250 characters, Moz says around 150-160 characters, and Google typically truncates to no more than, say 160 characters.
One might say then that clearly you shouldn't go above what Google shows, but my experience shows that it's not a deal breaker at all for ranking.
Thoughts?
-
Hit the nail on the head here! It's all about improving click through rates, and enticing the user to click through, after reading an enticing meta description
-
-
Official Google does truncate at around 160 so i usually shoot for that. I mean after all if our goal is to always do things that are useful for the web, I have to question how useful it is to go beyond what Google will use in search, but there is no penalty for going over 160 characters.
-
Meta descriptions play an important role whether or not they are counted in ranking. When done well, they can cause a searcher to click on your result over the others. If the clever description you write for your page is too long, it will get truncated or Google might choose to show something else entirely (which it might do anyway, especially depending on the search term). I like to use this tool when writing page titles and descriptions: http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html It allows you to see what your result might look like in Google's serps (it uses 70 characters as the allowed title length and 156 as the allowed description length).
-
Makes sense guys. Thank you.
-
I would only do this if it sits with the general theme of what is being said. Don't just try to make it fit just so it's in there.
-Andy
-
We generally keep our branding in the page titles as the suffix and focus on keyword matching in the meta descriptions.
-
Thanks, guys.
On that note, do you worry about branding in the meta description for non-brand queries?
-
We always stick with around 155 characters with the most important information in the first 60. This is because if Google decides to show big sitelinks, your meta descriptions will get truncated even further, thus showing less characters.
You are correct that meta descriptions have no weight on ranking. But, CTR does and this can be directly impacted by your meta description. Therefore, they continue to be worth your time to do them well. I personally don't think spending time writing over 155 characters is worth it because the chances of Google displaying these extra characters (at least in a way that will appear clean) is slim. You are better off letting them determine what to show based on user query and page content at that point.
-
Err on the side of caution where there is any doubt at all. No-one really know if Google use this in some capacity, so take no chances and keep it all clean.
-Andy
-
Thanks, Andy.
They say that the meta description isn't necessarily looked at, but Matt Cutts says it's important to have them. So, I opt to have unique ones for my most important pages at least: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308339/Matt-Cutts-Create-Unique-Meta-Descriptions-for-Your-Most-Important-Pages
You're right...maybe we shouldn't go above 160 characters? All else...?
-
Google say they don't use this in SEO at all, and if we believe that is plays no part, then you have a maximum of 150-160 characters to play with. If you go over this, it doesn't get shown anyway, so all you are doing is creating content that will never be read, or that 'might' get seen as an attempt to keyword spam.
Stick to the threshold and you can't go wrong
-Andy
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
-
Besides description and design optimization, is there any other main factor that we can influence to get better App Store rankings?
Hi there! I do love SEO, the cracking Web Search engine, but when it comes to other Google's search engines like Youtube and Apps Store it's an unknown field for me.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Gaston Riera
So, i'm diving into App Store Optimization, ASO. This is my question: Besides the text and the design in the description of the app, is there any other factor that we can manipulate or influence?(such as linkbuilding, social media or alien magic hehe). Thanks a lot!
GR.0 -
Having a Size Chart and Personalization Descriptions on each page - Duplicate Content?
Hi everyone, I am coding a Shopify Store theme currently and we want to show customers the size comparisons and personalization options for each product. It will be a great UX addition since it is the number one & two things asked via customer support. But my only concern is that Google might flag it as duplicate content since it will be visible on each product page. What are your thoughts and/or suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MadeByBrew0 -
Sometimes our meta description being displayed is not ours?
We just launched our new website a week ago (also switched to Wordpress). Yesterday I noticed that sometimes our homepage Meta Description displays something different in Google results than what we have set. I had others confirm the same result on their computers. I asked all who have been involved with marketing for company if that description was ever used for the company, as it seemed odd and worded very strange. No one has ever seen this or used this on any of our listings, social profiles etc ever. I check my meta descriptions set for home page and they were still correct. Also did a view source for cache page by Google and it showed the correct Meta Description. Still confused, I did an exact match search on the description and came up with about 30+ spam/link farm type of websites with this odd description noted by our name along with a link back to us. We never asked or paid for these. Why are they there? And how could this influence our homepage meta description? This has me very concerned that we might already be getting hacked. I see no other issues with the site. Looking for any help regarding: Why is the odd meta description showing up sometimes? Why do we have backlinks from these random sites? Is this all connected? Maybe trackbacks and pingbacks? Any help you can provide me is appreciated. Thanks! whJRuuQ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pac-cooper0 -
4 websites - meta titles and descriptions
I manage four separate websites/brands that all focus on the same topics and have the same achitecture. I am trying to improve each site's meta title and description, page by page, that I inherited from another before me. My question is, how different should each title/description be from one another for the same page type? Do the search engines consider this heavily in their decision process of who to show on SERPs? Am i able to simply swap out the brand name in the metas and call it done or should each meta be unique? if unique, how unique? As you can imagine, since each page is essentially the same with the same overall content and layout targeting the same keywords, it is very difficult to rewrite metas four unique ways. I greatly appreciate any advice on how you would approach this project.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Unique meta descriptions for 2/3 of it, but then identical ending?
I'm working on an eCommerce site and had a question about my meta descriptions. I'm creating unique meta descriptions for each category and subcategory, but I'm thinking of adding the same ending to it. For example: "Unique descriptions, blah blah blah. Free Overnight Shipping..". So the "Free Overnight Shipping..." ending would be on all the categories. It's an ongoing promo so I feel it's important to add and attract buyers, but don't want to screw up with duplicate content. Any suggestions? Thanks for your feedback!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeffbstratton0 -
Repetition in Title Tag and Description
Let's say this is a hypothetical title: "Chevrolet Parts in Buffalo, NY | Novotny Chevrolet" Would having two instances of Chevrolet between the name of the store and the keyword set off a spam warning or at least be a bad SEO practice? Also, would it be smarter to phrase it, "Novotny Chevrolet Parts in Buffalo, NY" or something of the sort? Would this principal also apply to meta descriptions? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?
Hi, Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore. There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow. There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts? thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0