Google increases character count on meta description

After testing was observed during 2017, Google has rolled out a change to the display of the description snippet in organic search results, increasing the character count to 320.

This allows for much more information to be displayed about the page returned.

The description snippet is not necessarily drawn from the meta description, but the meta is preferred where relevant to the search term used, so this change provides a lot more scope for optimised and informative meta descriptions.

Our SEO reporting and optimisation tools tools have been updated to reflect this change, as have the SEO tools built in to the latest releases of the sh404SEF and JoomSEF Joomla plugins, and the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin.