Google says Meta Description length does not matter for SEO

We know that a lot of discussion goes around on twitter/X everyday with regards to SEO as a lot of folks from the SEO community are quite active on the platform. Not only that, Google’s John Mu is also one of those personalities that is quite active on the platform even though he announced about his departure to another platform named Mastadon since Elon acquired it. Talking about SEO, we know that there is a concept of meta descriptions which is basically what Google’s robots crawler reads about your site or the article in first glance without going any deeper.

Now, there is a common saying that you need to keep your meta descriptions short and to the point so that Google’s crawler can know what the website or article is all about and it should be less than 150 characters as there is a limit as to how much Google can show your meta description on its homepage beyond your site link. One user asked Google’s John Mu yesterday about the correct use of meta description and he was told that his “client said 200-300 characters are not good and he should make those meta descriptions 155-160 characters”.

On this, Google’s John Mu said that this is obviously not true as the meta description can be below 100 characters as well. However, what was more interesting for others was that John said that “I’m sorry to tell you, those numbers are all made up. Whoever told them to you is leading you astray, probably not just in this regard (and I hope you’re not telling them to clients)”.

We obviously know that there is no number Google has given for the ideal length for meta description but it might also suggest that it does not matter at all. We are also aware that Google has started writing its own meta descriptions based on their understanding of the articles so half the times it is not even worth writing your custom metas as they are likely to be replaced by Google’s version of the same. One thing to note is that your CTR does depend on your meta descriptions.