If you haven't given your meta titles and meta descriptions some love lately, it might be a good idea to do so... there are new title and description lengths in Google results. Google has increased the width of search results for almost all users (although they could remove it at any time).
For reference, the space used by organic search results is now 600 pixels wide, compared to the old 500 pixels.
Titles
The new Title length is 70 characters before Google truncates the title with an ellipsis (…). This is an increase of 10-15 characters, which is quite significant. The length can go up to at least 71 characters, depending on the letters used, since L and I are the small characters.
Depending on the length of the words, there is a increase of 2-4 additional words which can be added to the title tag. Some sites that are happy with their title tag might add their site name to the end.
Of course, as with any SEO change, you'll need to monitor the CTR of old titles versus new ones, but don't forget that there are many other external factors that affect CTR, including that in some cases, every organic result will be higher, and some who were below may be above.
This is an example of 71 characters:
And another 71
Regarding mobile phones, its title length has also increased and is even longer than desktop titles.
Descriptions
Descriptions have also increased by about 16-20 characters per line. The new description length per line is 100 characters.
However (important!) Google is truncating the descriptions of many search results. This means that the overview is only displaying 150-160 characters total right now, in a 2-line snippet as usual. This is how they currently appear:
I would hope that Google will adjust their search results to allow longer descriptions, rather than the current situation where the second line is only using a little more than half the line of space compared to the first line.
We are also seeing descriptions that were 100 characters or less simply being displayed in a single line of description in search results.
If you have some “short but sweet” search results that are less than 100 characters, you will need to pay attention to them as they will reduce your “footprint” in the search results. For those with three-line snippets, it is currently 278 characters per line.
These new changes will be very good and more pleasant for SEOs who were struggling within the title limitations and who could use those extra characters (10-15) for their titles.
But keep in mind, Google may undo changes to the width of search results, and these character counts may vary for languages with non-English characters.
