Google typically displays up to 155 characters in the search results based upon it’s pixel cut off point of around 1,000 pixels in the desktop results.
There isn’t a minimum length either, but very short meta descriptions can mean that valuable space is wasted. Google also regularly tests different search results, and in the past has shown snippets as long as 300 characters. Sometimes when Google believes a query is more complex and deserves a longer answer, it can return much longer snippets. Google will truncate any meta description over this pixel limit, cutting off at whole words and displaying an ellipsis (” …”) to the user. A letter such as ‘w’ is wider than ‘I’, so depending on what’s used – some descriptions can have many more characters in the space available. However, their cut off point is based upon both the device type and pixel width. “There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.” Google state that there is no specific limit for meta descriptions. What Is The Maximum Length Of Meta Descriptions? Having a great descriptive snippet when your page is shared will boost CTR. However, when they are not specified using their own tags, both Twitter and Facebook will use meta descriptions when content is shared across their platforms. These are separate and different to the meta description tag. Popular social networks allow you to specify what’s used to populate snippets using their own meta tags, such as Facebook Open Graph tags, and Twitter Cards. CTR as a ranking factor is hotly debated, but it’s likely that click signals to a page are used in scoring and can have an impact on a page’s ability to rank. Meta descriptions can affect the click through rate (CTR) of a page in Google. Keywords in a snippet that are used in the search query are bolded, which helps them draw the eye. This makes them important for communicating to users what the page is about and enticing them to click on the result over the competition. Meta Descriptions can be used by search engines as the descriptive snippet in their search results. However, they can still be important in driving more clicks to a website in a couple of ways. So keywords used in a meta description are not used to rank the page. Meta Descriptions are not used as a direct ranking signal by Google for their search results (even Google say so). You are able to crawl the website, and look at the ‘ Meta Description‘ tab, which displays all pages, their meta descriptions, respective lengths and helps you identify common issues. Meta descriptions can also be viewed and analysed in bulk in an SEO crawler, such as our own SEO Spider software. They can often be viewed within CMS, such as WordPress which has various plugins such as Yoast SEO, which allows you to view and set meta descriptions. The rendered HTML is after JavaScript has run and is what Google will generally see. In Chrome, right click on the web page and choose ‘view page source’ to view the raw HTML, or ‘inspect’ element to view the rendered HTML. You can view the HTML of a web page to see a meta description. There’s a number of ways to view them, and the tool of choice will depend on whether you want to view just a single URL individually or a website in bulk.
You can read more about meta description length later in this guide. The 70-155 character range for meta descriptions will avoid the majority from being cut off in snippets, while making the most of the space available. There isn’t an exact size limit for snippets, and Google does at times shift the size of their snippets in their results.
Google can use meta descriptions for snippets in its search results and it truncates the length typically to fit device limits.
The optimum meta description length should be between 70 and 155 characters. The meta description tag should be placed in the head of the document and looks like this in HTML: Search engines can choose to use them to populate their search result snippets. The meta description or meta description tag, is an HTML element in the head of a webpage that should provide a concise summary of what a page is about. In this guide we take you through the fundamentals, as well as more advanced considerations and tactics when analysing, writing and optimising the humble meta description. Meta descriptions can be used in search engine result snippets, so writing a good meta description can be helpful for users and drive more clicks to a website.
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