Google Extends The Length of Snippets In Its Search Results

Google has announced an update for the way it displays snippets (descriptions of pages shown below the URL in an organic search result ) in its search results. 

Here is a screen shot highlighting the description snippet of a Google search result:

Earlier, the snippet length was 160 characters and after this update, it is almost 230 characters on an average.

A Google spokesperson has informed that this change has been made to provide more descriptive snippets in order to help people understand how pages that display in search results are relevant to your searches.

However, Google has not recommended webmasters to update the meta descriptions since the snippets would automatically generated based on the user query and content on the page. So, longer snippets are likely to be seen in Google search results from now.