You may have noticed that Google lengthened the search result snippets. In the past it displayed up to 160 characters, now it may be much longer. We are currently researching what this means for site owners. In this tutorial, I'll go over what this change means for you and us.
snippets can now be up to 320 characters long, or more in rare cases. We are looking for new best practices. In the meantime, Yoast SEO's green lights will work differently. To date, Yoast SEO will only give you an amber light if the length of your meta description is more than 320 characters.
What has changed in the search results?
Search result snippets are now much, much longer. This change came out of the blue, but it's obvious given what search results now look like on Google :
As you can see, the featured snippet is exactly the same as the “normal” blog snippet. The message a a meta description, which is much shorter, but Google grabs a “random” paragraph from the page and displays it instead.
What we think of the new way of writing excerpts
Of course, this snippet is not "random" at all. This paragraph has been explicitly optimized for classification in this excerpt. In fact, it has been optimized for this particular query along with others very similar. Almost all of the pages optimized for snippets now feature illustrated snippets that appear as snippets in normal search results.
So our conclusion is simple: Google enters the "base paragraph" for a particular search query in an article. It then displays that paragraph as an excerpt. Not entirely surprisingly, it would reinforce all your efforts on readability and better writing.
The question is, can you still view your meta descriptions? What we are thinking here is that you can probably the do it very reliably si the meta description contains the searched keyword. Of course, your description length will also need to match Google's new limits. But it already seemed the case in preliminary research, as if Google favored slightly more paragraphs with keywords dense, compared to a meta description that contained the keyword only once.
Another hypothesis we want to test in our research is whether removing the meta description leads to better snippets.
The impact of this change
With longer snippets, the click rate overall on search results should decrease slightly. People might find their answer in the search results. they may not need to click on it.
A falling click rate will be so bad depending on the goals of your site. For us, if people find an answer to their query in the search results, but associate it with the BlogPasCher brand, we will have achieved our goal. The value of the brand, in the long run, goes beyond the possibility of converting you into a customer after the click. If your business is focused on ad revenue, you would probably look at it from a completely different perspective.
Our analysis on the question
We are currently researching four groups of articles of equal size:
- A group of posts that will get a longer meta description, in which we'll only use the keyword once.
- A set of posts that will get a longer meta description. We will use the keyword several times, evenly distributed throughout the meta description.
- A group of articles for which we will completely remove the meta description.
- articles that retain their old short and classic description and will act as our control group.
Our research team will analyze the results of this research. After that, we'll probably do another test, with more sites, to try to corroborate our results. At the same time, we of course follow the publications of other publishing companies SEO on the subject.
What to expect from Yoast SEO
With these new changes, it goes without saying that new measures will apply to the plugin. So the character limit for the meta description was just wrong. Today's version of Yoast SEO fixes this increasing to 320 characters. As things evolve, expect further changes.
That's all for this tutorial, I hope it will allow you to adapt your SEO snippets.
