Google has officially extended the search results snippets to a maximum character length of 320 characters. They confirmed with me late on Friday saying:
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.
What are snippets? The description line under the clickable title and URL in the search results page:
Danny Sullivan, now at Google, also confirmed it on Twitter:
Yes. It's not your imagination. Our snippets on Google have gotten slightly longer. And agree with @rustybrick -- don't go expanding your meta description tags. It's more a dynamic process. https://t.co/O1UTyFeNfA
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 1, 2017
Google is telling webmasters to not go ahead and change their meta descriptions. Danny wrote "don't go expanding your meta description tags." He said the longer snippets are "more a dynamic process" Google automatically makes based on the content on that page and your query.
How long can those snippets be? Danny said a maximum of 320 characters. I believe the example above in the screen shot is a maximum of 307 characters but it can go longer says Danny.
I will ask around. But as a guide, it's not likely to be longer than 320 characters, which I believe is the max we show now. If you had a meta description longer than that -- AND we used it exactly (which often isn't the case) -- longer wouldn't show.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 2, 2017
Google has not yet made a statement about if they have changed their commendations for writing meta descriptions. Danny referenced a previous tweet from John Mueller of Google who said not to really make changes:
We're always working on search, there's not really anything specific to say there. I don't think we ever had a limit on description meta tag content length.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 28, 2017
We will see - but now, don't be surprised to see longer snippets. It is not just a test anymore.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
