This month, Google rolled out several updates that have made quite the impact on search results.
First, Google increased meta description length. Meta descriptions, or snippets, are the short summaries that appear underneath each result on a search engine results page (SERP). These descriptions were capped at 150 characters for the longest time, but had been seen to increase in length sporadically since 2015. Now, the increases have been made official. Here’s Google’s statement about it.
“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.”
Second, Google confirmed that it has made several small updates to its search algorithm as “part of our regular and routine efforts to improve relevancy.” These updates have been noted by search engine marketers as having early effects on sites using doorway pages and sites that lack Schema.org markup.
We’ll continue to watch the developments and provide updates here as needed.
Sources: Search Engine Land; Search Engine Journal
