The Details Behind Google's Unexpected Widening of the Search Results

Google has widened ALL of their search results across the board, which directly affected AdWords, local search and organic results. As you can imagine this caused a lot of buzz and many thought it may have just been a wide spread test Google was conducting. However, Google did just come out to confirm the shift within a post about the big changes in AdWords in which they said:

Earlier this year, we removed right-hand side ads on desktop to improve the search experience and make it more consistent across devices. This paved the way for us to introduce the biggest changes to our text ads since AdWords launched fifteen years ago.

That BIG AdWords change is the later this year release of Expanded Text Ads, which will be a much larger ad format that comes with two 30-character headlines, 80 characters for description, and an auto-extracted URL with customizable domain path.

Here's a quick look at the changes the new wider search results have created across the board.

• Title tags have jumped in size from 60 or so characters to 70 on average.

• AdWords ads went up to 600 pixels from the previous 500.

• The local search packs have gotten wider and more detailed. The updated 3-pack "snack pack" has a streamlined look, being informative and easy on the eyes.

• Meta descriptions now have 100 MORE characters per line and have grown from two to three lines. That's a big jump from 160 to 270 or so characters.

Remember, there is no exact character length when it comes to the aspects of your search results because each character takes up a different amount of space and different devices have different display sizes. This is how John Mueller explained the wider results:

I think what happened is we kind of increased the width of the column of the search results, on some devices at least, and in general we try to match the length to what we’re displaying. So it’s not that there’s any character coun...