Bad news! I said you can write meta descriptions for 300 characters, but it's not correct anymore. Everything has changed!
As of mid-May 2018, Google has reverted back to shorter display snippets and these changes are widespread.
Most meta descriptions are being cut off in the previous range of about 155–160 characters.
Do you thing a shorter meta description is great to reduce costs of marketing and simple to automate with codes meta descriptions using main keywords combinations?
The world is constantly changing. Nothing remains static. I wrote "SEO Prestashop Made Simple", but actually, you're always wake up every morning and ask your self: What's next?
Why Google won’t give specific meta description lengths?
The important thing to note is that Google has never given any specific character or word count for the meta description tags, even when they have increased the length in the past. So it isn’t surprising they are continuing the same.
As you know, John Mueller reiterated this when he said that the search results are very dynamic, as we can easily see when we spot tests in the search results. He said that it is important for Google to keep testing and seeing what works best for their users.
With this in mind, it is likely the shorter snippets was tested before being unleashed to everyone.
Just get to the point
They still shows search results with longer snippets. Especially for non-commercial queries, there are some longer snippet descriptions on the result page. The length of result snippets is dynamic.
Although there is no maximum snippet length, it might be a good idea to limit your meta descriptions to 150 - 160 characters if you want to be sure that the full description gets displaye on Google’s result pages. Remember that Google will only show the meta description of the page if it is relevant to the search query.
The good news (or bad news?) is most of the products descriptions on Prestashop sites are very short - the merchants maybe do not know what should they write on product's description.
For example, here you can see the product description of Bag of ‘sun stick’ chocolates from a famous website: "Bag of chocolate «bâtons du soleil» candied orange and hazelnuts" - 64 characters.
In e commerce, write product description with love is not easy. But if you have a blog, that's another story (and you should have a blog on your Prestashop website to have a higher ranking in Google results).
Should we just go back to a 155 character cut-off? If you've already written longer meta descriptions, should you scrap that work and start over? The simple truth is that none of us know what's going to happen next week!
We think writing effective descriptions that engage search visitors is still very important, in theory (and that this indirectly impacts even ranking), but you may find you can write perfectly well within a 150 - 160 characters limit.
Google seems to be rewriting more and more descriptions. This is difficult to measure, as many rewrites are partial, but there's no guarantee that your meta description will be used as written.
But at least, you can use SOO Pretty Urls module to improve SEO Prestashop without concern for the description meta.
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