The new information that Google is now allowing more room for the page title and description in the snippet is making rounds. Google has officially increased the length of the Google snippet in search results.
Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it has made a change to the way it displays snippets in search results to be more descriptive.
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What are Google Snippets?
Google Snippets are the text which appears in searches and below the website’s URL and describes the content on the page. As of now, most of the webmasters use Rich snippets which display the extracted and relatable content that uses reviews, ratings, images or videos under the website URL in the meta description, which can improve an SEO’s click-through rate (CTR).
There are many other snippets too like featured snippet, structured snippet etc., which provide information based on the content.
What is Meta Description?
The meta description tag in HTML is the snippet used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines sometimes use these Google snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it.
Meta descriptions are displayed every time a user launches a search request and consequently looks at the Search Engine Result Pages.
Beneath the blue-colored link, a short description text is displayed as a snippet in order to draw attention to the content and to prompt users to click on it – given that a Meta Description is provided.
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Google Snippets
For a long time, the optimal length for the description’s text was about 160 characters including spaces. Since this change, the possible length of a meta description has become about 230 characters.
Now the optimal meta description has a maximum of 230 characters. However, this number is relative, because the length of the snippets can vary depending on the device. In the SERPs on a smartphone, meta descriptions will cross over 200 characters.
Google Meta Description’s length should range between 160 and 230 characters, including blank spaces and if the description is longer, then it will be replaced with “…”, and the Google snippet will be less appealing to the user.
Meta Descriptions are supposed to give users a hint of the URL’s content. That’s why direct customer approaches or short cues are often used to promote the URL’s content. It is also common to include certificates, quality seals or rating stars in order to convince customers of a website’s trustworthiness.
Why Google has increased the length of Snippets
Google recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. The snippets are more often dynamically generated based on the user query and content found in both the meta description and the content visible on the page.
But Google is still not recommending the SEO’s update their snippets. This change also affects the length of the title. The new snippets view now allows up to 70 characters for the title instead of the previous 55. If this maximum is exceeded, the title is automatically truncated and appended.
With the shift in width, it could actually move search results higher on the pages, if some of the multi-line listings end up needing one less line. Many of the features in the main search results column are reduced in height, meaning that some organic results, depending on the particular search query, could be pushed up on the page.
A dynamically created snippet is more likely to be relevant to the searcher than the generic description of the page’s content, that most website owners write for a snippet. A page with a lot of information on it can’t encompass all of it into a single, one-size-fits-all snippet.
Dynamic snippets allow for the search query to determine the snippet shown, which can help users understand why they should try a certain link in the search results.
Long story short, longer snippets will be a boon to businesses that use SEO marketing and make it easier for consumers to find the sites they’re looking for. On the whole, the analysis of changes made by the google in google snippets can be easily extracted from the table.
Google Snippet | Previous length | Current length |
Title | 55 characters | 70 characters |
Meta Description | 160 characters | 230 characters |
Benefits of the Lengthy google snippet:
- The updated google snippet allows easy access to the piece of information the user is searching for.
- The additional features of Google snippet like the ratings, reviews, links, videos help the seeker to opt the best out of many.
- Webmasters made most out of those lengthy google snippets.
- Filters can be used to view descriptions that are too short or too long and easily review the results.
- The videos in the rich snippets will directly lead you to the video content on the YouTube.
- A well-described metadata can raise the chances of more users clicking on the search result and, thus, improving the click-through-rate of the website.
- The prolonged titles in the SERPs can attract a lot of people to click on the link and can improve your rank.
- The informational and descriptive snippet takes less time and reduces the effort in groping the desired information.
Conclusion
The Webmasters who are planning to design their snippets into a profitable one can try their luck and attain a good SEO rank. Google has provided more space for organic search results. We can only speculate about the reasons.
Basically, it is important that you act now and try to make the most out of the longer text length. For example, you can add more call-to-action in order to make your website standout in the search results.
This raises the chances of more users clicking on the search result and, thus, improving the click-through-rate of your website. Optimization of the snippets can make more audience scroll through your web page.
Adding the links, reviews, ratings, images, videos and making the keywords bold can make the web page top the search list. Making the most of it can land to better SEO rank.