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Posted on: Dec 10, 2017
Google has shifted away from its limitation of 160 charecter-length for snippets to 230 charecter-length to make them more descriptive to the users. This was officially confirmed once Search Engine Land – the SEO blogpost site with paramount authority – published the news a few days back.
For those, who’re a little less aware about all these developments, it is important to mention, a Google snippet is a small text, that automatically shows up in a SERP. When a user enters a query, the search engine displays a description of the page or the summary of the information the page contains. This summary is called a snippet and along with it, Google also shows the link or the URL to the page and its title.
Till recently, Google restricted this snippet to a length of 160 charectors, including the blank spaces. Now, the search engine is going to display snippets that will be upto 230 charectors long, counting the blank spaces. This way, the users will have access to a lengthier description of a webpage, which will make it easier for them to know what a webpage is about.
A spokesperson on behalf of Google was, moreover, quoted to have said “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.”
In fact, this latest trend of lengthier snippets was noticed by a renowned SEO company in London. According to our in-house search engine optimisers, this move itself confirms Google’s whole-hearted effort to make things more friendly and easy-to-use for the users.
On the other hand, the SEO world is divided over this new development. According to some, now onwards meta descriptions should be expanded to the maximum length of 230 charectors to be in-sync with the Google policy. While others are objected to this idea. This group is advocating, snippets are more often dynamically generated, based on a user query, the meta description and the content that is visible on a given page. Thus, Google will pull that lenghtier content from the page itself on its own. There’s no need to go for lenghtier snippet descriptions as of now.
The world of search engine optimisation is unbelievably volatile. You never know when an established trend will get reversed or something new will set in. To keep up with these important updates right on time, do keep following our blog post.
