Meta descriptions in Google search results ARE longer.
These descriptions show up right underneath the link to each search result. Google calls them “snippets,” and they’re a big deal.
We’ll go more into defining how it’s a “big deal” soon, but here’s a look at the old length vs. the new:
The change in meta length just happened across the last month of 2017 (less than a month ago).
Here’s a chart from RankRanger showing the SERP changes:
So, first, why do Google meta descriptions matter so much?
They are instrumental in describing the page that’s linked. Reading the snippet can thus help searchers understand whether the search result is relevant to what they need.
If the meta description is optimizing, clear on what to expect from the content, AND enticing (SEO, clarity, creativity), you’re more likely to click on it. The click-through on the organic ranking gets higher. That’s a lot to do in one meta.
You can see why great meta descriptions are so important.
Here at EW, we write meta descriptions all the time for our clients. It’s a fine art, because you have to cram the essence of what a page is about into a limited amount of characters. Then, you have to make it sound awesome.
With the character limit increased, this gives us a little more room to be creative and really speak to the reader. In turn, this gives you a higher chance of getting clicks and conversions for your content.
Let’s discuss the change, including exactly when it happened, and why this is great news for your business.
Why Google Upped the Character Limit for Meta Description Snippets
“We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.”
The snippets grew from around 160 characters to an average of 230 characters.
The official maximum character count allowed is now 320.
Why Does the Change Matter?
When you’re trying to write a description of a page for the search results, double the amount of space makes a huge difference.
Let’s be clear, though: The meta description has no effect on your page ranking. This was true before and it’s true now.
Instead, this snippet of descriptive text is for users, for their benefit.
As we said, the snippet could make a user want to click on your page in search results over a competing page. It may sound more tempting because it’s a better description, it’s persuasive, or both.
That said, Google won’t always use your meta description in the snippet.
Depending on the user’s search query, the search engine may instead pull snippets of content from your page.
John Mueller goes into this in detail on a recording of a Google Hangout that streamed on December 12, soon after the changes occurred. This topic starts up at about the 29:41 mark:
Here’s the tldr; –
Meta descriptions are important to get right.
They help describe your pages for users.
Google will sometimes (but not always) pull your meta description to use in the snippet that shows up with your link in search results.
Google will pull your meta description if they think it’s a more accurate or relevant summary than any text they could pull from your content.
If your description is accurate, relevant, concise, and well-written, you may have a better chance of nabbing click-throughs.
Google highlights the importance of high-quality descriptions, specifically:
Besides the benefit to you when you create good descriptions for each of your web pages, it’s simply a good usability practice to follow.
What to Do Moving Forward
You get that you should be creating unique, high-quality meta descriptions for each of your pages on your site.
But what about the descriptions you already have in place? Should you go back and lengthen them just because you can?
Not necessarily.
Don’t Lengthen Old Descriptions – Unless They’re Critical Pages
According to Google, they’re still looking for relevance and conciseness when they consider text to use in snippets.
Lengthening your meta descriptions won’t necessarily make them better in either of these areas.
Instead, think of this change as a chance to make your meta descriptions going forward even better. You have a little more wiggle room for creativity and persuasiveness to sprinkle into a highly relevant summary of your page.
One exception would be critical pages of your site – the most important content pieces, landing pages, etc. that get the most search traffic. Moz, in particular, recommends going back to these and reoptimizing the meta descriptions.
Don’t just lengthen them though – rewrite them with the new limits in mind. You may come up with something completely different, but even better than before.
What Are Best Practices for Meta Description Creation?
For meta descriptions, striking the balance between appealing to users and still giving a great summary can be tricky.
Because it can be an art form, here are some best practices to follow to help guide you:
Always include the focus keyword and the top secondary keyword in the description. This helps establish relevance right off the bat.
Use the focus keyword as early in the description as possible.
Use action-oriented words to describe the benefits to users if they click on your page. For example, start with words like “discover,” “find,” or “explore” – i.e. “Discover how to write fantastic meta descriptions.”
Of course, this is just a primer on writing meta descriptions.
Great ones don’t always follow a formula, but they do accurately entice readers with hints about what’s waiting for them when they follow a link.
Not a Meta Description Wizard? No Worries
If creating snazzy meta descriptions that bring in the click-throughs is a bit daunting for you, Express Writers can help.
We regularly write descriptions that sing the exact tune searchers want to hear. If you need some assistance with wordsmithery, let us write your meta descriptions for you.
Anyone who is familiar with Google’s algorithm updates knows that they are extensive, frequent and often vague in terms of detail.
Although Google’s most recent update, Google Panda 4.2, was released in July of 2015, many SEOs believe that the rolling-out process of the newest major Panda update isn’t actually done rolling out.
Read on to learn more.
Looking At the Current Panda 4.2 Update
When Panda 4.2 was introduced in July of this year, its express purpose was to reward quality content and down rate scraped, duplicate or low-quality content. From the get-go, it was clear that this Panda was a little slower moving than the others, but, even as the weeks began to wear on, very few SEOs expected so much time to pass before admins started to notice changes in their sites. Sites that were hit by Panda 4.1 have had to wait 10 months to redeem themselves and, due to the fact that 4.2 is also painfully slow to roll out, it’s unclear whether the changes made by those previously affected sites have actually been effective. Needless to say, this is a source of frustration in the SEO community.
In addition to being amazingly slow to implement, Panda 4.2 is also impressively extensive. When Google released Panda 4.2, it stated that 2-3% of Google’s search queries would be affected but, when you take into account that Google gets billions of daily searches, 2-3% equates to roughly 36 million affected queries. This makes it the broadest update in quite some time due to the fact that, between 2011 and May of 2014, no individual Google update affected more than 2.4% of search queries. Even though SEOs know that Panda 4.2 will affect millions of searches, the entire process has been so slow to roll out that nobody knows how, exactly, those millions of searches will be eventually be affected.
In the light of all of that ambiguity, it’s tough to make any solid statements about Panda 4.2. The one thing that SEOs do know for sure about this Panda update is that, as usual, quality content is the only safe place to be. This means avoiding things like keyword stuffing, ugly sites or exploitative SEO practices. Because Google has dedicated itself to rewarding high-class content and down-ranking sub-par content, sites that publish well-written, original content are less likely to be negatively affected by the mysterious new Panda updates.
While nobody quite knows just yet what Panda 4.2 will reward or punish, most SEOs believe that creating great content and avoiding bad SEO practices is a safe place to sit and wait for the changes to begin showing themselves.
Questions Regarding Panda 4.2’s Status
The main question people have about Panda 4.2 is “is it here?” The answer is “Yes – but only kind of.” Panda 4.2 was instated around July 18th, 2015, at which point Google said the changes would take place over “several months.” Obviously, that’s vague at best and absolutely unclear at worst. What we do know is that Google waited 10 months after Panda 4.1 to release its next update and that a large portion of that was due to technical glitches and complicated system issues.
Additionally, while it’s not uncommon for a Google algorithm change to take a number of months to go into full effect, it’s clear that this one is going extra-slowly. This is actually the slowest Panda roll out to date and, as such, many SEOs are concerned that the new changes are so complex that they can’t easily be instated in a matter of days.
Google, however, says this isn’t true. During numerous interviews, the company has stated that the new Panda roll out isn’t going slowly purposely to confuse SEOs or to make life more difficult. Instead, the company says that this slow Panda roll-out is a preview of coming attractions: a time when Panda will be one, large, continuously rolling and changing system that is incorporated into the company’s most fundamental algorithms. While the company acknowledges that they’re not there, yet, it seems as if this ultra-slow Panda roll out is the first step in that direction.
Additionally, the company has assured SEOs that, while Google Panda 4.2 is a site-wide action, it is unlikely to affect each of a site’s pages in the same way, which is why many SEO’s have yet to see any real or definitive changes. Sites that are bound to be dinged by Panda 4.2 may not actually know it until the entire roll out is complete – some time in the distant future. At that point, affected sites will need to wait until Google releases its next update in order to revamp their pages.
The Verdict: The Newest Panda In the Works May Not Hit Us Before 2016
Considering the fact that there were 10 long months between Panda 4.1 and Panda 4.2, it seems unlikely that the next update will happen any time before 2016.
For now, the best Google has to offer is that site owners should keep an eye on their analytics. By isolating organic traffic driven by Google and closely analyzing any large dips or boosts, site owners can begin to get an idea about whether the big Panda is here and, furthermore, whether it has begun to affect their sites or not.
What You Can do to Stay Sane During the Slow Roll Out
Although many SEOs feel a bit helpless during this time of Google ambiguity, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the uncertainty and ascertain whether Panda 4.2 has affected your site:
1. Frequent Site Audits. The first is that you can keep checking your site for any positive or negative impacts that seem different from the norm. This is likely to be a strong indicator of the fact that Panda 4.2 was there. Unfortunately, however, once the changes are instated, it’s too late to do anything about your site and, if you have content that is going to be punished by Google, it will be punished no matter what you do.
2. Stay Informed. With that in mind, it’s wise to continue keeping an eye on your site and visiting popular Google hangouts for any definitive news about Panda 4.2.
In the meantime, be extra aware of web spam and crappy content and avoid both like the plague. While the new Panda may be more mysterious than all of the others, SEOs need to take comfort in the fact that there will eventually be some answers.
While Google Panda 4.2 is officially here, it’s tough to know exactly how it’s going to affect sites just yet. While it’s not all that different than previous updates, Panda 4.2 promises to be increasingly tough on content mills, web spam and poorly written pieces.
Conclusion
In light of this, the solution is the same as it ever was: cling to high-quality, original content and avoid bad SEO.
That way, when the big, bad Panda does decide to show its face, your site stands a better chance of being prepared.
Roundabout August 2014, Google announced that it was including HTTPS as a lightweight criteria for aiding page ranking.
When Google said this, not a whole lot of people took the news truly to heart.
Previous exploration of the statistics had shown that HTTPS was pretty much a parallel of HTTP and that there was no real overlap between them.
But now, suddenly, in the last week or so—HTTPS traffic has had a big ranking boost. Is this Google’s realization of a statement that Matt Cutts made in 2014 about wanting to see more rewards for sites using TLS?
Reviewing What SSL & HTTPS Content Is
To understand why this is an important issue, let’s define these two acronyms. No insult to anyone’s intelligence: it really is something that needs defining.
HTTPS stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure“, which is, in layman’s terms, a more secure version of the HTTP that we all know and love. Its major use is in sites that traffic in sensitive information, i.e. banks and other e-commerce based pages. HTTPS is easy to spot online as it’s usually prefaced by a padlock icon right before the site name in the address bar.
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and is the successor to TLS (Transport Layer Security). SSL encrypts a connection (as opposed to a single file) ensuring that all data that passes through the connection is secure and unable to be tampered with by external entities. Together, HTTPS and SSL provide a solid layer of security and a good deterrent to malicious entities.
What Does HTTPS Have To Do With SEO?
Until recently, HTTPS (if it was even considered relevant to SEO) provided a very minor rankings boost, typically less than other indicators such as high quality content. This seems to have changed recently. In the last few days, the investigation of HTTPS URL’s on page one of a search increased dramatically compared to the previous ten days. This in itself is news and cause for concern. What is it that’s making these HTTPS sites rank so well all of a sudden? When we assess the possible causes we are left to assume that either:
Google’s algorithm updated to a point where HTTPS is now considered a lot more important to page ranking or
A massive movement of one or more popular domains from HTTP to HTTPS.
Taking these two as our premises, we can now set out to get to the bottom of this crazy swing in page rankings.
Welcome to HTTPS, Wikipedia! Following the Statistics Trail
The first thing we have to see is if there was a large domain that shifted across from HTTP to HTTPS that might account for a huge (9.9% in fact) change in page ranking for HTTPS pages. A cursory glance allowed us to discover that Wikipedia, a page that already accounts for a lot of page-one traffic, was slowly doing a changeover to HTTPS. Since Wikipedia makes up a large volume of our page-one rankings then it may be safe to assume that their switch is what skewed our readings by such a large margin. The only way to figure if Wikipedia’s change was what caused our statistics spike is to leave it out of considerations to see if this is an HTTPS gain and not one due to Wikipedia’s massive bulk.
When we isolate our statistics to remove HTTP/HTTPS from the results (by considering them both as equal), we still see a change (although obviously less massive than before) when it comes to page-one rankings. This translates to the idea that HTTPS may be getting a boost in rankings from somewhere. We can see that having HTTPS as a protocol is beneficial to the user and maybe this provides a further clue as to whether this is just an anomaly or something more in-depth.
HTTP Content & Google’s Overall Perspective
Google has changed its Internet focus from being search oriented to being user oriented. They have realized that by catering to users first, they are building a trustworthy presence on the Internet. How they are doing this starts with their algorithm changes. From the time Panda was released to Google’s mobile update a couple months ago, we can see how Google is slowly making webmasters consider their audience. Gone are the days when a page’s ranking was based solely on the amount of keywords it had stuffer per total page count on the screen. Now it’s all about user benefits and HTTPS offers a lot of benefits to the average user. HTTPS is especially important in situations where sensitive information may be at risk.
HTTPS exists as a method of empowering the user by ensuring that all information that concerns him or her is unable to be broken into by a third party that is unaffiliated with either side of the connection. HTTP doesn’t allow for protection of a user’s account information or ID and if it is used on a login page then it can be vulnerable to penetration by third parties and makes for a great target for people to obtain information about a user. If this is a Google update, it is centered on the user (as most of the modern updates to their algorithm are) and rewards sites that put users first.
What This Means for Us as Content Publishers
We understand exactly how important any addition to Google’s algorithm is. Although it’s not a confirmed addition it has all the bells and whistles associated with a Google update. The only way we’ll know for sure if it’s a permanent Google update is when Wikipedia’s site finally settles down into HTTPS mode and we can observe the ripples on both the HTTPS and HTTP side of things. In any case, what we should be considering is how HTTPS can help our users since it’s likely that in the future whether your site is SSL-compatible or not may actually affect your search ranking a bit.
As a content publisher your content is accessible by all users and information they submit to your site can be vulnerable to external penetration. This in itself is not too worrying if the information submitted is of a non-essential nature. Things get a little bit trickier when it comes to more sensitive information. HTTPS ensures that an eternal entity cannot spoof your address in the hopes of phishing information out of your visitors. Your audience trusts your site to the point where it would allow your site access to some information unequivocally. Having HTTPS on your site ensures that no on abuses this trust between you and your audience and makes you a more trustworthy site overall: an important factor in your overall page ranking.
Two Main Ways HTTPS Works
HTTPS ensures a connection is secured on both ends so that an external source cannot garner information passed over the connection for malicious purposes. How does this comes down a three-step process:
Encryption: Data passed from the client to the server and vice versa are encrypted to keep that information safe. This means that when a user is on a site, it is impossible for another user to “listen in on” or “eavesdrop” on the data being sent to and from the server.
Data Integrity: This means that the data going to and coming from the server cannot be changed. It stops attacks by “injection” where an external entity can change or edit data as to make it unusable by the server.
Authentication: This ensures that the server that the user is connected to belongs to the business they intend to deal with. It also stops “man-in-the-middle” attacks where another user spoofs the server in order to intercept data that is meant for the server which can then be decrypted.
How do I Add HTTPS support for my site?
There are a number of ways to do this but the most efficient method (and that recommended by Google) is to include server-side 301-redirect requests for any HTTP page to send the user on to an HTTPS secure page. Alternatively you can use a server that supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) which shunts users to an HTTPS site even though they entered an HTTP site in the URL bar. It serves as a drastic measure but ensures that you don’t serve unsecured content to your audience.
Why HTTPS May be Important in the Future
Methods of obtaining information through illicit means on the Internet is not exactly something new. From the early days of viruses that installed back doors in computers to the relatively modern practice of phishing, it is clear that we can’t ever wipe out the processes by which people are relieved of their valuable information online. And make no mistake, in the virtual world, information is as good as hard currency in the real world. In order to protect users that utilize our site and to ensure that we remain a secure and trustworthy domain to deal with, we should consider setting up HTTPS on our servers.
It may take some work, but the overall benefits would be worth it in the long run, especially if this Google update pans out and further enforces HTTPS favor.
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