Meta Description Length

Randhal007 · Apr 26, 2015

Hi,

is it possible to filter all urls of a project with too long meta-descriptions (e.g. with more then 150 letters)? I often need this feature, but couldn't find it with regard to website auditor at the moment.

And it would be great to get information regarding the use of h1, h2, h3 on the urls.
thx and cheers

elcidofaguy · Apr 26, 2015

I think the best way to solve this is to write your own script which parses each page with looking for meta description tag and counting string length in order to determine if more than 150 chars.. Thereafter to find all heading tags and extract the text held within... To then dump the data to a text file or insert to a database... You could write that in pretty much any language from MS-Access (VBA), PHP, C#, Java etc..

That aside you might want to have a look at scrapebox.. I'm not sure but it might be able to provide some of what you are looking for...

McCauley · Apr 27, 2015

Randhal007 said:
Hi,

is it possible to filter all urls of a project with too long meta-descriptions (e.g. with more then 150 letters)? I often need this feature, but couldn't find it with regard to website auditor at the moment.

And it would be great to get information regarding the use of h1, h2, h3 on the urls.
thx and cheers

I found some codes may be helpful for you if you are using wordpress blog

Code:

$the_str = substr($excerpt, 0, 150);
$the_str = trim(preg_replace( '/\s+/', ' ', $the_str));
return $the_str;

Using at your meta description where you want to trim long meta-descriptions that longer than 150 chars.

1SEO · Apr 30, 2015

Randhal007 said:
Hi,

is it possible to filter all urls of a project with too long meta-descriptions (e.g. with more then 150 letters)? I often need this feature, but couldn't find it with regard to website auditor at the moment.

And it would be great to get information regarding the use of h1, h2, h3 on the urls.
thx and cheers

Too long meta-descriptions aren't a huge issue if you have a description that goes over by 10-50 characters, Google will not penalized you. Make sure your descriptions are written well, truncating your own descriptions could harm you, since it may be cutting off a word and make your description look automated or not written well.

arronmattwills · May 1, 2015

Better not to exceed 72 characters in the website title and 150 character is fine for meta description. But some websites i have seen that they used more keywords, lengthy description and fully opposite to organic S E O guidelines. Temporarily they might be ranked well in search engine but at some point, after some update it will be punished and through out of the search index.

Website Title, meta tags, meta description, ogg tags, heading tags etc., Should be related to the website content and should not exceed the limited number of characters. Manipulating the search engines will leaves you sad experiences. Improving content quality and visitor flow will increase your organic ranking.

gksankit · May 2, 2015

standard size for Meta description is 160 character

SEOPub · May 2, 2015

Arariel said:
To be fair, even if Wikipedia had meta descriptions it'd still be huge.

Of course they would. I just was using a popular example of someone who does what I was suggesting. Everyone knows Wikipedia.

Arariel said:
Essentially, meta descriptions are useless. Has it always been like that? or have they served a purpose at some point?

They played a bigger role in rankings at one point, but we are talking over 10 years ago. The only thing they are valuable for now is CTR's, and like I said, I would rather let Google pick one for that reason. Their understanding of language and searcher's intent is getting pretty damn good. I've experimented with this, and in every single test I ran, CTR's went up.

Meta Description Length

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