Google has officially confirmed that it has once again made changes to the snippet display in desktop and mobile search results. Here's everything we know about these latest changes.
In December 2017, Google began testing and implementing snippets with descriptions up to 300+ characters. According to our testing last December, these new descriptions were mostly automatically generated by Google based on the content of the page.
On several occasions, we found that Google was happy to use the first 300 characters of content to generate this new snippet without using the meta description in .
If the search engine had not officially recommended webmasters and SEOs to update their meta description, many had.
Since May 08, 2018, according to the descriptions of average length tracking tools in search results such as RankRanger, the search engine has once again changed the average size of display descriptions to return at an average more classic of about 160 characters (compared to the average of 220 characters recorded as a result of the December update).
In the version desk, on Google.com, the new average length of descriptions displayed in search results would now be 150 characters (up from 225 since December 2017):
En mobile devices, on Google.com, the new average length of descriptions displayed in SERPs would now be 115 characters (up from 185 since December 2017):
What does Google say about this?
John Mueller and Danny Sullivan reacted to the change by confirming that Google now has smaller snippets than before, but that could change over time. Google no longer recommends a fixed ideal size for snippets, as the search engine dynamically loads the number of characters to display to users based on what they deem useful to the user.
