Summary: As of mid-May 2018, Google has reverted back to shorter display snippets. Our data suggests these changes are widespread and that most meta descriptions are being cut off in the previous range of about 155–160 characters.
Back in December, Google made a significant shift in how they displayed search snippets, with our research showing many snippets over 300 characters. Over the weekend, they seem to have rolled back that change (Danny Sullivan partially confirmed this on Twitter on May 14). Besides the obvious question — What are the new limits? — it may leave you wondering how to cope when the rules keep changing. None of us have a crystal ball, but I'm going to attempt to answer both questions based on what we know today.
Lies, dirty lies, and statistics...
I pulled all available search snippets from the MozCast 10K (page-1 Google results for 10,000 keywords), since that's a data set we collect daily and that has a rich history. There were 89,383 display snippets across that data set on the morning of May 15.
I could tell you that, across the entire data set, the minimum length was 6 characters, the maximum was 386, and the mean was about 159. That's not very useful, for a couple of reasons. First, telling you to write meta descriptions between 6–386 characters isn't exactly helpful advice. Second, we're dealing with a lot of extremes. For example, here's a snippet on a search for "USMC":
Marine Corps Community Services may be a wonderful organization, but I'm sorry to report that their meta description is, in fact, "apple" (Google appends the period out of, I assume, desperation). Here's a snippet for a search on the department store "Younkers":
Putting aside their serious multi-brand confusion, I think we can all agree that "BER Meta TAG1" is not optimal. If these cases teach you anything, it's only about what not to do. What about on the opposite extreme? Here's a snippet with 386 characters, from a search for "non-compete agreement":
Notice the "Jump to Exceptions" and links at the beginning. Those have been added by Google, so it's tough to say what counts against the character count and what doesn't. Here's one without those add-ons that clocks in at 370 characters, from a search for "the Hunger Games books":
So, we know that longer snippets do still exist. Note, though, that both of these snippets come from Wikipedia, which is an exception to many SEO rules. Are these long descriptions only fringe cases? Looking at the mean (or even the median, in this case) doesn't really tell us.
The big picture, part 1
Sometimes, you have to let the data try to speak for itself, with a minimum of coaxing. Let's look at all of the snippets that were cut off (ending in "...") and remove video results (we know from previous research that these skew a bit shorter). This leaves 42,863 snippets (just under half of our data set). Here's a graph of all of the cut-off lengths, gathered into 25 character bins (0–25, 26–50, etc.):
This looks very different from our data back in December, and is clearly clustered in the 150–175 character range. We see a few Google display snippets cut off after the 300+ range, but those are dwarfed by the shorter cut-offs.
The big picture, part 2
Obviously, there's a lot happening in that 125–175 character range, so let's zoom in and look at just the middle portion of the frequency distribution, broken up into smaller, 5-character buckets:
We can see pretty clearly that the bulk of cut-offs are happening in the 145–165 character range. Before December, our previous guidelines for meta descriptions were to keep them below 155 characters, so it appears that Google has more-or-less reverted to the old rules.
Keep in mind that Google uses proportional fonts, so there is no exact character limit. Some people have hypothesized a pixel-width limit, like with title tags, but I've found that more difficult to pin down with multi-line snippets (the situation gets even weirder on mobile results). Practically, it's also difficult to write to a pixel limit. The data suggests that 155 characters is a reasonable approximation.
To the Wayback Machine... ?!
Should we just go back to a 155 character cut-off? If you've already written longer meta descriptions, should you scrap that work and start over? The simple truth is that none of us know what's going to happen next week. The way I see it, we have four viable options:
(1) Let Google handle it
Some sites don't have meta descriptions at all. Wikipedia happens to be one of them. Now, Google's understanding of Wikipedia's content is much deeper than most sites (thanks, in part, to Wikidata), but many sites do fare fine without the tag. If your choice is to either write bad, repetitive tags or leave them blank, then I'd say leave them blank and let Google sort it out.
(2) Let the ... fall where it may
You could just write to the length you think is ideal for any given page (within reason), and if the snippets get cut off, don't worry about it. Maybe the ellipsis (...) adds intrigue. I'm half-joking, but the reality is that a cut-off isn't the kiss of death. A good description should entice people to want to read more.
(3) Chop everything at 155 characters
You could go back and mercilessly hack all of your hard work back to 155 characters. I think this is generally going to be time badly spent and may result in even worse search snippets. If you want to rewrite shorter Meta Descriptions for your most important pages, that's perfectly reasonable, but keep in mind that some results are still showing longer snippets and this situation will continue to evolve.
(4) Write length-adaptive descriptions
Is it possible to write a description that works well at both lengths? I think it is, with some care and planning. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for every single page, but maybe there is a way to have our cake and eat at least half of it, too...
The 150/150 approach
I've been a bit obsessed with the "inverted pyramid" style of writing lately. This is a journalistic style where you start with the lead or summary of your main point and then break that down into the details, data, and context. While this approach is well suited to the web, its origins come from layout limitations in print. You never knew when your editor would have to cut your article short to fit the available space, so the inverted pyramid style helped guarantee that the most important part would usually be spared.
What if we took this approach to meta descriptions? In other words, why not write a 150-character "lead" that summarizes the page, and then add 150 characters of useful but less essential detail (when adding that detail makes sense and provides value)? The 150/150 isn't a magic number — you could even do 100/100 or 100/200. The key is to make sure that the text before the cut can stand on its own.
Think of it a bit like an ad, with two separate lines of copy. Let's take this blog post:
Line 1 (145 chars.)
In December, we reported that Google increased search snippets to over 300 characters. Unfortunately, it looks like the rules have changed again.
Line 2 (122 chars.)
According to our new research (May 2018), the limit is back to 155-160 characters. How should SEOs adapt to these changes?
Line 1 has the short version of the story and hopefully lets searchers know they're heading down the right path. Line 2 dives into a few details and gives away just enough data (hopefully) to be intriguing. If Google uses the longer description, it should work nicely, but if they don't, we shouldn't be any worse for wear.
Should you even bother?
Is this worth the effort? I think writing effective descriptions that engage search visitors is still very important, in theory (and that this indirectly impacts even ranking), but you may find you can write perfectly well within a 155-character limit. We also have to face the reality that Google seems to be rewriting more and more descriptions. This is difficult to measure, as many rewrites are partial, but there's no guarantee that your meta description will be used as written.
Is there any way to tell when a longer snippet (>300 characters) will still be used? Some SEOs have hypothesized a link between longer snippets and featured snippets at the top of the page. In our overall data set, 13.3% of all SERPs had featured snippets. If we look at just SERPs with a maximum display snippet length of 160 characters (i.e. no result was longer than 160 characters), the featured snippet occurrence was 11.4%. If we look at SERPs with at least one display snippet over 300 characters, featured snippets occurred at a rate of 41.8%. While that second data set is fairly small, it is a striking difference. There does seem to be some connection between Google's ability to extract answers in the form of featured snippets and their ability or willingness to display longer search snippets. In many cases, though, these longer snippets are rewrites or taken directly from the page, so even then there's no guarantee that Google will use your longer meta description.
For now, it appears that the 155-character guideline is back in play. If you've already increased some of your meta descriptions, I don't think there's any reason to panic. It might make sense to rewrite overly-long descriptions on critical pages, especially if the cut-offs are leading to bad results. If you do choose to rewrite some of them, consider the 150/150 approach — at least then you'll be a bit more future-proofed.
Thanks for the warning!
Before May I changed all the meta descriptions so that they had more than 150 characters thinking that it would be better for SEO. And now I find this on Google's part.
I had already noticed something, but when using the Yoast SEO plugin, it indicated that everything was green.
All this isdesperate!
I prefer to return the META descriptions to 150 characters, since my website describes what services we have available. If a person searches for a service and does not appear, he may not click on my website.
The problem is that with 150 characters it is difficult to write copy texts that fall in love. But yes, maybe the best thing is to take a step back and cut meta descriptions.
I think that what Google wants is that we squeeze our brains. Basically writing a meta description is similar to writing a good viral tweet.
I think of it as a writing exercise, a challenge. With fewer number of words to say what I want and how I want.
I don't always succeed but I don't blame the meta description. I blame myself for not being a good-enough writer:(
But then I remember- there's always next time:)
Yes, we need to keep it simple, that's the only way possible now. It's a pity they came back to old standard, for some pages it was worth to have extra caracters to resume our content in the google search results.
I would give it a little time. First, we don't know if this is going to change again. Second, if your descriptions have useful information in the first 150 characters, it's not disastrous to have them cut off. People who are interested will follow the "...". If the first 150 characters is mostly lead-in or marketing company then I honestly don't think that's a great approach for Meta Descriptions. People skim, right or wrong, and i think you have to get the most important information out front.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers, what about the possibility that meta description will become obsolete altogether? I think that the rate in which Google is pulling meta data from the content leads into a direction where we won't need to write meta descriptions anymore.
Last time I dug in, we were seeing rewrites on about 50% of display snippets, *but* the challenge is that a lot of rewrites are partial, so it can be tough to tell when Google is using part of the Meta Description, even if it's not an exact match. There are other place sit can be used, like third-party tools and social sites, so it depends a bit on your situation. Some very large sites are dropping them and letting Google do the rewrites, and I expect we're going to see more of that over time. Personally, I still want what control I can get for critical pages, but that control may be less and less as we move forward.
I also use Yoast, and it gives a Red/Green light indication of whether the meta description is too long or short. My goal is usually to provide essential info in the meta description and I don't mind shortening words or replacing them with symbols (eg. & instead of "and" + instead of "plus").
Another trick (though it depends on your brand tone or voice) is to use emojies in the meta description. It's good for CTR and it shortens the meta data since you can just put a visual representation instead of a whole word. :)
Very good point!. It's as important attracting attention as writing good descriptions.
I usually write the meta descriptions with 200-250 characters. My strategy is that each phrase makes sense in itself and then I cross my fingers that google does not cut me one in half.
Thanks for the info Dr. Peter J. Meyers!
I think that's a great strategy, and if that's how you've approached writing them, I would let them stay 200-250 characters.
Great job! Thanks for sharing this with us. I am always struggling with the meta descriptions so your article has been really useful, I am going to start working on this right now.
Thank your for the amazing tips!
Hi Dr. Peter J. Meyers,
Somewhere your this post has saved some of my clients! How?
Even I observed these changes since last 2-3 days that for some of the search terms search engines still show the description of not more than 175 character and these changes even vary by location too! With the last updated Google announced about increase in the character length we just started optimizing only top 20 performing pages for each of our clients web-page! Even they started indexing by search engine, and now half way we see the cut down in the character length.
Thanks for the ref. character length of 175, and will be now come back to this length; keeping the old files save for further if someday Google again wishes to show more character length descriptions :-)
Thanks
Ankit
This is meta description you've write for this post:
"In December, we reported that Google increased search snippets to over 300 characters. Unfortunately, it looks like the rules have changed again. According to our new research (May 2018), the limit is back to 155-160 characters. How should SEOs adapt to these changes?"
But, for search query: "how to write meta descriptions in a changing world", Google shows (for Moz blog) this description:
"Unfortunately, it looks like the rules have changed again. ... First, telling you to write meta descriptions between 6–386 characters isn't exactly ..."
Google excluded stop words, and uses sentences from post which match my query (bolded words).
It may seem that Google doesn't care about your description, but that's not true.
On the same SERP, position 7, is a scraper website who scraped this post entirely, and have same title tag. The only difference is meta description. They use slightly changed summary (first paragraph on this post) and part of the second paragraph as description. And in SERP, Google uses part of their meta description as a description for their website:
" Our data suggest that these changes are widespread and that most meta descriptions are cut in the previous range of about 155-160 ..."
Does this mean that Google will use a meta description if it is the same as the first paragraph? Is this correlation or causation?
Google isn't supposed to mess with my display snippet until 30 days have passed and comments are closed on the post :)
That first version (which I can also see) is, admittedly, a lousy snippet. In this case, I think it's entirely due to query relevance. Google can't find that phrase "write meta descriptions" in my Meta Description, so they're looking in the text. That's a tricky thing, because you can't write a description that matches every query, and Google is always going to take liberties. I don't think it's necessarily an issue of the description matching the first paragraph.
If I wanted to do keyword research and decide which terms I really cared about, I could put those terms in the Meta Description and try to improve my odds. Most days for most pages, that feels like overkill, but once a page exists for a while and starts to get traffic, it would be interesting to see what it's highest-volume terms are and rewrite the snippet around those terms.
apple.
Hi Dr. Pete,
Greetings from down under.
In a very brief and unscientific study, it looks like Australia has a variation on your findings.
It is varying by position, with the first 3 getting longer descriptions.
In one example, the counts were as follows:
265; 275; 248; 160]; 157]; 155; 161]; 159]
The ones shown with the closed bracket were truncated with the typical ellipsis.
The first two, including one from Wikipedia, don't have meta descriptions at all.
The third one did but Google chose to extract some text.
The truncation begins with #4.
So, not sure if this is a regional test or something permanently different?
Cheers,
Eric
Interesting. It's a bit hard to separate, because I'm seeing a solid correlation between SERPs with Featured Snippets and those with display snippets >300 characters. While Featured Snippets can theoretically come from any URL ranking on page 1, they're *much* more likely to come from the top 3 positions. So, I'd expect to see some relationship overall, with top-ranking positions more likely to show extended snippets.
I think it is important to carry out a common sense approach. When we heard about the longer descriptions we implemented this on our blog pieces but not our main site as 155 characters is more than enough for our retail pages (over 2,000) and is inline with our competitors.
Not wanting to sound like a bore but we decided that the content we write on our pages should be able to carry the weight for a 300+ character description and ultimately gave google the choice of using an optimised 155 meta or our wonderful content.
I suppose what we did was try and hedge our bets on both options and i think we were right. Google said that it was taking the longer content from on page content rather than meta data anyway. So we are going to keep up with writing our meta to 155 characters and write really great question answering content.
Good morning Peter,
I love your post! It seems to me that the descriptions are one of the things that most influence the CTR in the search engine and also in many occasions in the conversion, so in a CRO project it is one of the forgotten ones.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for these explanations, these will be very helpful in dealing with the changes in length of the description in Google SERP. I believe the length-adaptive descriptions will be a good solution in this scenario till the time we are sure that Google Updates are stable.
This is very important for SEO. This is a good article! It has served me well, I have even improved the position in Google
It always revert back to the 80/20 rule. To me, meta descriptions take 80% of the time for 20% of the returns. That's why I've only switched only my top pages last when it changed to 300 characters, and that was more than enough effort for the results. I like the inverted pyramid 150/150 tactic, which provides a viable solution for meta description automation and limitation of long term headaches.
Thanks again for the head's up.
Great to see a bit of research from a respected source to backup what we are seeing with clients. I totally agree that for the most important pages on your site you should re-write based on the circa 155 character limit. Also taking the time to review these on mobile and tablet to make sure they are not being truncated.
The inverted pyramid technique is such a great tactic for content marketing but I had never considered it for meta descriptions before - what a great tip.
Keep up the good work :)
Within a few weeks, I'm going to be trying to claim that the inverted pyramid is useful for buying shoes and making sandwiches, and the zombies of journalists long-gone will come to life and eat me (and probably justifiably).
I have nothing left to say about. As recently I have given my full time to right those lengthy metas for almost many pages. And now this happened..
And they (Google) are never gonna admit that what they actually going to show up.
"Danny Sullivan" from Google said literally about meta description's lenght on 14 May 2018: "Our search snippets are now shorter on average than in recent weeks, though slightly longer than before a change we made last December. There is no fixed lenght for snippets. Lenght varies based on what our systems deem to be most useful."
Thank you for this nice post and it really make sense to me.
But quote:"Keep in mind that Google uses proportional fonts, so there is no exact character limit. Some people have hypothesized a pixel-width limit, like with title tags, but I've found that more difficult to pin down with multi-line snippets (the situation gets even weirder on mobile results). Practically, it's also difficult to write to a pixel limit. The data suggests that 155 characters is a reasonable approximation."
It is possible to work with pixels and different fonts. Before the change in december '17 from Google in my previous agency we created a "SERP Simulator". With more than 2 years of research and testing I put those requirements to the dev who programmed the tool.Before the change it worked fine for mobile and desktop. After the change I tested by just doubling the content (in pixels) and it also worked in most of the cases.
My experience in the current environment: 600 px for a title and 750 px for descs works fine for mobile and desktop IF the content of T&D's are relevant.
Here is the link for the simulator: https://serpsim.adtraffic.de/app/ (it is in German, but the key features should be easy to understand)
Hope this was helpful.
And I also like and will consider your other approaches how to deal with new and former descriptions :-)
I think we talked on Twitter a bit. I do think Google may be using a pixel limit for display snippets (we use one in Moz Pro for display titles), but it's a bit tougher to pin down with the multi-line format. I've also just found it confusing for people. We can grasp the ideal of pixel width for a single line, but it gets weird with Meta Descriptions. So, I've opted to stick with a character limit, even knowing it really is an approximation (and the pixel width is more precise).
I have noticed a lot of changes from SERP to SERP before this change, as well. My company publishes a ton of recipes and if our Schema is implemented correctly we also have the cook/prep time, rating, and nutritional info (calories) eating up a lot of the "characters" so we've been at around 150 characters for a while now for those searches/content despite updating the limit in our CMS. That is, of course, when Google actually pulls ours and not the whole recipe onto the SERP in spot 0 or truncated into the meta description.
Good point -- recipe SERPs look a bit more like video SERPs. That thumbnail and the rich snippets cut into the space a bit, best I can tell.
I have to admit I was pretty sad and disappointed to see meta descriptions rolling back to 155-160 characters from the much enjoyed 300+ characters. The truth is a cut off or "..." isn't the Kiss of Death as Dr. Pete said and I am not going to panic about it. I am excited to test out the 150/150 approach though! Thanks for sharing your insight here!
I also think that it is best to do shorter meta descriptions.
Luck me I didn't have the time to change my meta tags to the new length so now I don't need to do anything nor lost any time with this. But many people might be mad with google right now, and with a good reason!
Thanks Dr. Peter for sharing this Excellent post with us.I usually write the meta descriptions with 145-155 characters so I dont need to change :).
Thanks for giving the proper knowledge about "Meta Description" Dr. Peter!! But I have one question, We can see there are lot's of sites appeared with body content as a "Meta Description" still those sites has around 150 characters "Meta Description", So which one is good? Should I set the "Meta Description" for my site or let it go depend on Google?
That's something I wouldn't be comfortable answering off the cuff for any given sight. There are sites who have chosen to leave them all blank and have done perfectly fine. Personally, I still like having some of that control. It depends on the costs, risks, etc., though. Wikipedia doesn't write Meta Descriptions, because they couldn't do it by hand, and so they'd have to auto-generate them. Google's capability to auto-generate is better than most of ours, so if that's your option, then probably leave them blank. Even then, I think there's a hybrid approach where you could leave them blank for some pages (like long-tail product variations), but write them for critical pages.
Over the last few years Google has continually increased dynamically populating elements in SERP's, be it imagery, schema markup, business info, etc. As they get better and better at determining the most useful parts of a page in relation to the search term, THEIR interpretation will take further precedence over yours - and however you express that in X number of characters in a meta description.
My money's on meta descriptions going the way of meta keywords...
Hi Dr. Peter,
Thanks for this comprehensive guide! Meta-descriptions are really important in boosting SEO and your advice will certainly be useful for many organisations.
Interesting look at meta data!
Place your kws in the first sentences of the article and Google will show that as a description. Do it in such manner not to be spam and to be semantic friendly. The kws are not a must to be as an exact match but to be relevant to kw searched. In the most cases Google will not show the meta description you mention and instead will use sentences from you article.
I tend to go with the length that I can be bothered reading when I'm hunting around for stuff in the search engines.
I just put the most important info first, CTA, then additional helpfully info. Google can cut it as much as they like and I don't have to worry so much when this kind of thing happens.
excellent post.Most of my website page rank fall after this update .Should i reduce to 150 again?
Yes Google keeps on giving us new updates. I guess it would be better if we stick to 155 characters and provide the best meta description. Further, adding SCHEMA to your content really helps you highlight your content if even if you don't rank first.
You can add anything to your ratings, your plus points, timings, etc. Schema is displayed in different way which makes your content different from your competitors.
My Conclusion is that there is no conclusion, regarding meta descriptions. We have to wait and see if Google has another update. No one knows when and if it's even going to happen.
Thank you for quting me in the headline Pete!
Very interesting Dr Pete! Google sure does like to keep us on our toes. That’s what makes this industry so interesting though isn’t it, the need to continue to evolve and kearn
I like your idea about the inverted pyramid meta descriptions. At the end of the day it all comes down to testing really doesn’t it. Just like tweaking title tags and content for better results.
Thanks for the food for thought!
Meta Descriptions are extremely useful. You should be able to summarize
the whole post within 150 characters, which is simply amazing. A good
copywriter knows how to sell his products and services, Crafting a sharp
META Description not only propel click-throughs but also increase your
search rankings. Thanks for the post.
Thanks for the information as I got worried when I saw these changes occurred with my website VM Interactive from past few days. But after reading this article I get relief now.
No one has asked the most important question here, is this an A-B Test by Google and in 2-3 weeks time they go back to 300 characters in length. For me I am just gonna wait one month and let the dust settle before thinking about adjusting meta descriptions.
My gut feeling is that, since Google loosely confirmed this and we're seeing it widespread (not at the typical low-% testing level), this is not a test. However, something can go live and still get pulled back. There are definitely no guarantees, which I hope is clear in the post. We're only talking about today, as best we can.
Excellent article and in a language that we can all understand. In my opinion some good meta description were indispensable a few years ago when it came to positioning, but nowadays and in my opinion I think they are not so important. I have pages with almost no meta and very well positioned and others with perfect meta and do not position so well. I think we're in the content era and that's all Google cares about.
It looks like Google has again reverted it back to about 300 characters. default snippet limit for my website https://www.conversionperk.com had reduced to about 155 characters days before yesterday (Keyword Hire PPC Expert) but today I'm again seeing about 310 characters in snippet section for the same keyword. Would someone please confirm.
You'll still see some snippets >300 characters in some situations. I'm not aware of any return to that at scale.
I'm glad they went back to the old character count. Writing a description that is 300+ characters long is like writing a short blog post. Also, it just seems to make good sense that you would want your users to be able to quickly scan the snippets and click a link.
Shorter meta description, it is great to reduce costs of marketing. It is simple to automate with codes meta descriptions using main keywords combinations.
I don't have a problem meta data that appear on search engine. I don't have a problem with open graph data that appear on social media. But I have a problem when I share my website to WhatsApp, because the meta data, open graph, featured image, etc doesn't appear.
Very good contribution, I have put into practice in several projects and even that I do not upload if I got more visits. thank you very much
Dr. Peter J. Meyers, Thank you for this guide. At one time, it was very useful to me. I will wait for other useful articles.
Love the 150/150 suggestion. I've been thinking about how to implement this for clients since the longer descriptions started becoming more common. I think this is a smart "future-proofed" approach to meta description creation.
Very interesting, you have to try to increase the CTR in the serps, nothing better than to improve the descriptions.
Thank you. This had to be written as many people were worried and even SEO agencies do not know how to respond to their concerns.
Thank you so much for your detailed information, this data will help me in writing better meta description.
Thanks Dr. Peter for sharing this Excellent article with us.I have one question about Meta descriptions for website page. Could you please let me know how i write my meta description for multiple keywords? Suppose if i want to target my website for SEO New York so how i add other relevant keywords (SEO New York, SEO Services New York, Best SEO New York etc) in same descriptions so that i get rank it on short time durations. ?
Keep in mind that your Meta Description is, best we know, not a ranking factor in 2018. So, only use multiple keywords if it's natural, descriptive, and likely to generate clicks. You don't want to keyword-stuff it, or Google may consider it low-quality and do a rewrite.
That said, it's a lot easier to naturally mention 2-3 key phrases in 155 characters than it is in a title tag. As I mentioned in the post, try to make sure the critical keywords/concepts get mentioned earlier in the tag.
Dr Meyers i agree with the points you make about keywords but do you really believe that it is not a ranking factor? I know that google has said that it is'nt but we saw a massive increase in our rankings when we optimised our meta descriptions
So, let me just say that I don't think that keywords in your Meta Description are a direct, Capital-R Ranking Factor. However, I think engagement (long clicks, etc.) is very important to ranking, and your Meta Description impacts CTR pretty profoundly in some cases. I just try to use "ranking factor" very carefully. I think it matters quite a bit for SEO, in a broader sense. I also want to be clear that it matters in the sense of driving people's interaction with your site and those signals, not in the sense of trying to fill it with keywords.
Meta description limit is reduced from 320 char. So is it advisable to change the meta descriptions?
I made all the meta description according to the latest update on my new project started last week. but what about the old one?