The meta description is a snippet of up to 320 characters, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO .

Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets ~300 characters (this limit increased in December 2017). It’s best to keep meta descriptions long enough that they’re sufficiently descriptive, so we recommend descriptions between 50–300 characters. Keep in mind that the “optimal” length will vary depending on the situation, and your primary goal should be to provide value and drive clicks.

Over the past week or so, many have been noticing that the snippets were longer than what’s typically been shown.

Rank Ranger has been tracking these as well, and according to its tools, the snippet length has grown from 160 characters to almost 300 characters on average.

The new update will help in providing more useful information rather than just stuffing of keywords in the meta description. It is recommended not to update the meta descriptions or title. Google automatically picks up the update based on the page content and search relevance.

But the length of meta description for Search Engines like Yahoo and Bing still remains the same as of today. So, it’s a best practice to make sure that your important highlights of the page are included in the initial part of the meta description. You can use online tools to check if your meta description length can be read everywhere in search engines. With these changes and the at the moment, we can hopefully find a lot of changes in the snippets and results in the coming days.