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Google Updates Title and Description Lengths for Search Results

If you haven’t been keeping yourself abreast with the latest search engine news, you might have missed a very important update that Google made to the SERPs. Back in May 2016, Google, the search engine giant, extended the length of Titles and Descriptions. The news was greeted with PANIC by webmasters around the globe! This update came just after a recent change to the SERPs which had been made earlier.

Length of Title tags was extended from 50 – 60 characters to 70-71 characters. This allows one or two more words to squeeze in, adding a lot more sense and detail when writing Title tags.

Google SERPs Update

A similar change was also seen for Meta Description tags, which increased from their usual length of 155-160 characters to 200 characters, which is 44 characters more than what it was before. It is expected that Google would adjust their search results to allow for longer descriptions, but it is also expected that Google might just reverse the change at any time. Changing your Titles and Descriptions just now might not be a good idea unless you’re sure that the change will stay permanently.

Many webmasters didn’t see any change in their CTR (Click-Through Rate), while others saw a positive impact on CTR. If you’re not interested in ranking high in search results, you might just sit idle and do nothing. Your competitors will climb up in the SERPs with new modifications to their Titles and Descriptions. But if you don’t want to miss out the action, you can add a new column to your database for the new titles and metas along with the old titles and metas.

Another important thing to note is that the change was updated to both desktop and mobile devices. However, some meta descriptions are exempt to this update, which show as many as 283 characters. As long as your website has rich content and is user-friendly, you can expect to see an increased click-through rate with longer titles and metas.

Let us know in the comments below if you saw any change in your website CTR or not.

Google Supplemental Results go mainstream

Google Supplemental Results Labels trashMany Blog owners and webmasters have been continuously upset about their new website and pages ending up in the Supplemental Index. Nothing to worry about now, as Google has removed the ‘supplemental result’ labels from the search results.

Google originally introduced Supplemental Results in 2003 so they could separate unimportant pages, and pages with duplicate content from their main index. The Supplemental Results were displayed as a result to queries made by searchers if no substantial results could be fetched from the main index. The whole idea was to make the search results more relevant and not to show old pages with little or no content in the Search Results. Learn more about Google Supplemental Results at ABCSEO.

Now, Google has extensively changed the way pages are indexed and added to the main index, which is why they are making the supplemental results go mainstream. Many blog owners, webmasters and website owners have given positive feedback about Google doing this, as they can put their efforts on new things and stop worrying about the Supplemental Index Results. Other searchers have shown their criticism as they will have to visit the Supplemental Pages when doing a search which might affect the quality of the Search Results displayed.

Check the official Google Blog where they announced this, and also the article at Search Engine Journal.

Google and Digital Millennium Copyright Act

I was doing a search for the KW ‘SEO’ today to see where my SEO Blog ranks on Google for the keyword 😉 However, when I reached the 4th or 5th page of the SERPS (my settings were set to show 100 results per page), I got the following error at the end of Google’s Search Results:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

Google DMCA

Some of you might already be aware of this, but this was really surprising for me as I hadn’t come across such a thing before.

You can read Google’s policies regarding the Digital Milennium Copyright Act by following the link.

Social bookmarking service Del.icio.us Firefox Add-on

Del.icio.us has recently launched the new and updated Add-On for Firefox which makes bookmarking websites easier and fast. Del.icio.us had been loosing a lot of its users owing to its slow speed to Bluedot.us, a competitor site, but recently, Del.icio.us has made significant speed improvements by their new bookmarking Add-On for Firefox which will prove to be beneficial for them.

The latest Del.icio.us Add-On for Firefox can be downloaded here.