Google Description Character Limit
The Google meta description is the snippet that appears beneath a site's title on the search-engine results page, or SERP. The description is bound by a character limit. Characters and words in the description that appear after the character limit's cutoff are not displayed in the description.
Other People Are Reading
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What is the Character Limit?
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The Google meta description character limit is 155 characters. Depending on the individual word character length, this usually equals 25 to 30 words. When the site's meta description is too long to display in the Google snippet, an ellipsis is placed after the last listed word.
Length and Importance of the Description
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A meta description longer than 155 characters will not have a positive or negative impact on one's rankings in the search engine. If the meta description tag is not used, Google automatically attempts to retrieve the first 155 characters of the page content to display on the SERP. However, Google's bot cannot retrieve the text from Flash-based sites. If no meta description tag is present in the Web page, the SERP will not display a page description.
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Nonstandard Characters and HTML
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Nonstandard characters and symbols such as stars and copyright symbols will show up correctly in Google's meta description snippet. However, formatting is stripped off. This means you can't use text styling such as italic or bold letters in the Google meta description.
How to Include the Meta Description
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Most content management systems, such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and ExpressionEngine, include a field in the article template for entering a page's meta description. If you manually build pages using HTML, you can manually create the meta description. Use the following template to create the meta description on a page:
<meta name="description" content="Type your meta description here." />
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