The Meta Description Box

As long as the first 160 characters of the meta description you have now are enough to get a good index, there yould be no problem.

Hmmm – well I noticed that the 360 character limit was just rolled out on a trial basis.

Rather astounding that Yoast implemented this new feature when it was based on a trial run with no warning that it was a trial?

I’m not blaming Yoast here, but their lack of foresight leaves a little to be desired.

Hi,

I also had noticed this change in the past few days…

When I you do a site: search from my desktop, I see that either the meta description is truncated to fit the new limit, or Google finds something else altogether on the page to show in the search snippet.

Yet, when I press F12 to open Developer Tools (on Chrome, at least), and click on the toggle to see the results as if from a mobile device, (and reload the search to make Google generate a mobile search results page), I see that a larger size applies!

Yet, when I perform the exact same search on my iPhone SE (4″ display), I see that the results are even smaller than what’s being shown to the desktop user.

So I guess if your website is responsive and the same content is served to both desktop and mobile users, you’d have to develop the art of meta description writing to the point that it gives the user all it needs to know in the first half, then add something else for the mobile crowd, hoping that Google finds the room to display it.

This article gives some information about the move toward a dynamically-sized snippet, including quotes from Google about it:

https://www.compose.agency/insights/meta-description-length-2018

Hey,

Google has confirmed that the length of the meta description has changed again, although it should be slightly longer than what it used to be before.

Unfortunately, we do not have any accurate data yet on what would be the recommended length now, it seems that the length of snippets can vary now, but we will update Yoast SEO as soon as we have more information.

You can also follow the progress of this report here.

It’s like I said months ago – the green changing to orange line sure is pretty, but a simple character counter like the one AIOSEO has would be far more efficient.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by steveraven.

@steveraven @cbrandt @jocada

Thank you, everyone, for your input on the meta description length. A character counter wouldn’t necessarily work as it isn’t just about the number of characters as some letters like ‘w’ take up more space than letters like ‘i’ so that also has to be taken into account.

We will be tracking progress on this update from Google in the feature request and possibly bringing it up for discussion, but again, if you’ve already optimized your meta description for the longer length, it shouldn’t matter too much, as long as you know you’ve placed a well-written and useful meta description in the first portion.

Point taken, however a greeny-orangey bar that changes when it hits 320 characters is far more misleading than a counter, especially when the snippet preview in Yoast is still set to 320 characters.

Noticing that the mobile optimisation is even more restrictive, but also noting that Google will be exclusively using mobile searches in the future, we’ve amended our description boxes to under 130 characters, despite what Yoast’s snippet preview is indicating.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by steveraven.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. A feature request is currently open in our development repository for this so our development team can decide for this change. You can find and follow the progress of this from here: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/9731