Nicolas
CIO & Co-founder
Google has officially announced that the length of meta descriptions is increasing from 160 to 320 characters.
The giant of search engine reports that it has increased the number of characters to 320 to provide more accurate and useful search results for internet users.
We had noticed for some time that our meta descriptions were much longer, but no official confirmation had been made by Google.
Judging by the results of this tool, we can see that since mid-November, the average length of meta descriptions are increasing. The average is now 230 characters!
Since Google’s coming out, many SEO experts are tempted to change the length of their meta descriptions according to the size of their website, but the new meta descriptions are dynamically generated according to the content of the website, therefore it is not guaranteed that Google will use the longer descriptions along with your site if the content is not there.
To counter this, I strongly advise you to go with a sentence of 160 characters to start your new meta description and to add 140 characters, more focused on ”calls to action”.
That way, if Google decides to only show the 160-character description, you are out of trouble!
I strongly advise going with trial and error and see which meta works best for you!