The Season Of Giving: Leveraging Charities For Link Building
Google's Search Snippets Go Longer:
What We Found Out Researching 1M Snippets
What We Found Out Researching 1M Snippets


- what results we've got analyzing 1,000,000 snippets;
- whether you should change the length of descriptions (spoilers: you should);
- how to do it properly.
What's changed?
What's changed?
Using Serpstat's "Top by Keyword" tool I found how the SERP looked like before this update. The second organic result on September 12 was Wikipedia, let's take a closer look at its snippet. As you can see the snippet's length was 165 characters.


How did we run an analysis and what results did we get?
How did we run an analysis and what results did we get?

As you see, the graph we got is quite interesting as it's bimodal distribution, let's call it "twin peaks distribution graph." Thus there's no sense to count the average snippet length for this kind of distribution. The classic approach to an analysis of bimodal distribution is to represent them as a mixture of two normal distributions.
The first peak covers the webpages that:
1) were optimized for 140 characters, which was a recommended length;
2) weren't re-indexed by Google for a long time (ago in a galaxy far, far away).



Is it time to make your descriptions longer?
Is it time to make your descriptions longer?
Moreover, during the latest webmaster hangout (Dec 12) John Mueller — Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google suggested updating your meta descriptions to support the longer search results snippets. Watch this video here:
Audit module from 100-140 characters to 300 characters.
What to write in updated description?
What to write in updated description?


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