Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do Yelp and Justia get all the extra Meta Description Real estate?
-
I was doing some KW research for a client and noticed something interesting with regard to Yelp and Justia. For a search on DWI Attorneys, they each had over 300 character meta descriptions showing on the SERP without truncating. Everyone else was either truncated or within limit of roughly 160 characters. Obviously if there is a way to get something other than a list to show that way you can own some real estate. Would love to hear from some of you Mozzers on this. Here are two images that should assist.
Best
Edit: I found one that was not a directory site and it appears it is Google doing it. The site has no meta description for the home page and this is what is being pulled by Google. There are 327 characters here! The truncation marks are showing it being pulled from different parts of the page. Image is Killeen DWI Attorney.
NOTE None of these are clients, etc. I also changed the cities so this is a general search.
-
Although I haven't tested this myself, I've heard others say that removing the meta description is one way to get Google to show a bigger description in the search results because they pull information off your website instead of sticking to the character limit of the tag.
-
As I know Google has made a significant change since 2016 to its search results pages by extending the length of titles and descriptions.
Title tags have been increased to 70–71 characters, which is up from its previous 50–60 characters. That’s at least enough to fit in another word or two.
Meta descriptions have been increased by 100 characters per line, and extended from two to three lines. That’s a significant increase, and presents far more of an opportunity to tell searchers what the page is about.
Google is still truncating the descriptions to two lines for many search results still, so you may still see them coming in at around 160 characters at times. When a three line snipped is displayed they come in at 278 characters per line.
t’s important to note that this may be a test which Google could reverse at any time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/4ixf86/google_has_increased_the_width_of_the_search/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How to get local search volumes?
Hi Guys, I want to get search volumes for "carpet cleaning" for certain areas in Sydney, Australia. I'm using this process: Choose to ‘Search for new keyword and ad group ideas’. Enter the main keywords regarding your product / service Remove any default country targeting Specify your chosen location (s) by targeting specific cities / regions Click to ‘Get ideas’ The problem is none of the areas, even popular ones (like north sydney, surry hills, newtown, manly) are appearing and Google keyword tool, no matches. Is there any other tools or sources of data i can use to get accurate search volumes for these areas? Any recommendations would be very much appreciated. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Are rel=author and rel=publisher meta tags currently in use?
Hello, Do these meta tags have any current usage? <meta name="author" content="Author Name"><meta name="publisher" content="Publisher Name"> I have also seen this usage linking to a companies Google+ Page:Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello0 -
Getting SEO Juice back after Redirect
Hi, On my website, many product pages were redirected over time to its product category, due to the product being unavailable. I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice. However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Wrong meta descriptions showing in the SERPS
We recently launched a new site on https, and I'm seeing a few errors in the SERPS with our meta descriptions as our pages are starting to get indexed. We have the correct meta data in our code but it's being output in Google differently. Example: http://imgur.com/ybqxmqg Is this just a glitch on Google's side or is there an obvious issue anyone sees that I'm missing? Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Owens_10 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0
