Google changes snippet character limit

If you have not yet filled out your meta description and title tags, it might not have been a mistake. Google has recently introduced longer snippets in the search results column. Now the width of the column is 600 pixels instead of 500 pixels, which has made a big difference to title and meta description length.

Title length has increased by 10-15 characters and is now 70-71 characters, depending on the font used. Consequently, you can now add 2-4 words to the title. With these changes having been introduced, SEO specialists should check their CTR. Other factors affecting the click-through rate are also important, including ranking changes following the update.

A description tag can now contain about 100 characters on each line. Nevertheless, Google continues to limit the description to 150-160 characters for a 2 line snippet and to 278 characters for a 3 line snippet.

Those who have short snippets which are less that 100 characters long might want to rethink their strategy, because their ranking positions can drop several places due to such economy of words.

We hope that Google will update the search results display in the near future. And it is necessary to bear in mind the facts that Google may roll back their changes, and that the number of characters varies with the language.