Comments on: Tested: The Best Length for a Description Tag is Longer Than You Think

By: James

James — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:13:43 +0000

Appears the search goes well past 380 now. I stumbled upon this site when I noticed a site I visited had a paragraph long description. Full length is 961 charactors. I did a search on 5 words clustered at the end, and Google found the page. Also, the description then wrapped and continued at the begining in order to have a full description. Search (with strings to make it the first page): “year on 14 analytical systems”

By: Thomas Lartin

Thomas Lartin — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:44:12 +0000

I am guessing this information is the same, has anyone done any tests recently though?

By: Lee Johnson

Lee Johnson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:42:48 +0000

Aviva,

Now that we are in 2013, have you found that this still holds true? I plan on rewriting the descriptions to my websites. I have previously copied the entire Meta description as an H1 tag in the page content. What I gather from your article, the page content may not have to include the entire description verbatim. Is this true? Thank you for a very interesting article.

By: Corky Swanson

Corky Swanson — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 01:51:51 +0000

Terrific experiment, Aviva! Will have to be careful now because the 140 character limit has been keeping me succinct, and succinct writing tends to be better.

By: Aviva Blumstein

Aviva Blumstein — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:51:23 +0000

Hi Cathy,
I just reran the searches I wrote about above, and the same results are still showing up, displaying the description tag beyond the 156 characters. (Although there are a bunch of new pages also, like this blog post and its scrapers. 😉 So it seems to still apply. Happy rewriting!

By: Cathy

Cathy — Wed, 30 May 2012 07:46:56 +0000

Very cool experiment! Do you know if it still applies now (2012)? I’m just rewriting meta-descriptions for a client right now, and am wondering what word count I should be aiming for.

By: elaine nicholsons

elaine nicholsons — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:19:16 +0000

Has anyone implemented Aviva’s test on their website or for clients’ websites? I’d really like to hear if anyone else had positive results as I’m about to re-write my description tags to 160 characters. Now, I don’t know whether or shorten them or write better ones – albeit more than 160.

thanks

By: Aviva Blumstein

Aviva Blumstein — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:37:37 +0000

In reply to Nick.

Thanks, Nick. I hope you see good results from implementing the ideas.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:14:13 +0000

Thank you for the post Aviva. The first time when I learnt about the seo aspect of having less than 160 characters in meta description, I sat one day and reduced the length of the descriptions on all my web pages. And, I use ‘All-in-One SEO Pack’ plugin for my blog and it actually warns me about using more than 140 characters and not even 160. Well, thanks to your experiment I won’t worry about these any more.

By: Aviva Blumstein

Aviva Blumstein — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:32:03 +0000

In reply to Lyena Solomon.

Thanks for your input, Chris – I actually didn’t see it before I posted my own reply (I guess it was waiting for moderation). Your approach sounds good – good luck with trying it out!