Some Search Result Snippets Double in Size

As was discussed in-depth within our December MasterMind Meetup, Google began showing longer search snippets within the search results pages sometime late November. What was previously limited to about 160 characters has been almost doubled to showing descriptions up to 320 characters. Here's Google official statement on the change:

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... there’s no need for publishers to suddenly expand their meta description tags, if they feel their current ones are adequate.

The meta description, which is where the search snippet content is typically pulled from, is not a ranking factor. However, the longer search result gives you more real estate on the results page to engage users, increase click throughs and can ultimately push your competitors further down the page. For example, look at the screenshot below in which a page's newly edited and much longer meta description was served up in the search results about 12 hours after it was rewritten:

Keep in mind that this update does NOT change the fundamentals of writing your meta description tags. You want to start with your most important keywords, do your best to entice the user to click into your site and stick to about 300 characters to be safe. Remember, Google often takes the liberty of creating its own snippet for search result listings based on content within the page if they feel like they can do a better job. They do this about 40% of the time according to a recent MOZ study.

Our advice is to NOT go and rewrite all of your meta descriptions. This is something you'll want to test out on a couple of pages and see what happens. Considering adding to the existing meta descriptions to be sure the 300+ character count of content is there if Google wants to serve it up.

If you're using the Yoast SEO plugin within WordPress, then it's important that you know Yoast has already updated their plugin to reflect the new character limit. Again, don't let the plugin's prompts ma...