Snippets Are Now Twice As Big

by Patrick Altoft on March 24, 2009 / 6 responses

For those of you who have painstakingly written meta descriptions that are 155-160 characters long this news might be slightly unwelcome.

Google is now showing up to around 350 characters in snippets for some longer queries.

Big Snippet

All the meta descriptions on Blogstorm are auto generated using a plugin so I’ve changed the length from 160 to 350 characters to see what happens.

Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.

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Comments

Read the 2 comments below, or add your own!

Matthew Oxley

March 24, 2009 at 6:00pm

Just searched for a few queries that trigger this ; I don’t personally think this is too impressive, but maybe it’s because we’re all used to just a short snippet.

iQuote Developer

March 25, 2009 at 9:46am

If Google starts to favour sites with longer meta descriptions, this will mean vast amounts or recoding for web developers (including ourselves). However as this is a recent amendment, a wait an see policy might be a more prudent approach for now.