The average description length on Google’s result pages is back to 160 characters (even less for mobile)

On Twitter, Google’s Danny Sullivan said that the snippets on Google’s result pages are no shorter on average than in recent weeks. Tests show that the average snippet length is about 160 characters for desktop search results and about 130 characters for mobile search results.

Danny Sullivan also said that the length of snippets is dynamic and that there is no maximum length:

What should you do now?

If your meta descriptions are longer than 160 characters, chances are that Google’s won’t show the full description on the search result pages. A good description can increase the number of clicks that a web page gets on Google’s results page.

Google only uses the meta description if it is relevant to the search query. If the meta description is not relevant, Google will create a snippet that is based on the content of the web page. If you want to be listed with good descriptions on Google’s result pages, you should create relevant web pages with relevant content and relevant descriptions. The web page optimization tools in SEOprofiler help you to improve your pages:

Improve your pages

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.