When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
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I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S
I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version.
**My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
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I believe that this is going to be such a tiny tiny benefit that it might move you up from position 998 to 997, but if you are in the top 30 positions in the SERPs it will have zero impact.
It is also possible that the longer your description, the smaller the impact on any keyword.
I would invest my time in short, hot descriptions that elicit clicks.
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Thanks Oleg.
Couldn't it help (even if a little) with ranking if the term that is in the meta description (the long one) wouldn't have been there otherwise?
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Sure, it could match the search term and move around to display in serps but it won't help with ranking. The other downside is now instead of a complete message (which is the goal of a meta desc), you are letting G decide what parts to show and may not get your message across as you would like.
Ideal scenario is using the keywords within the max meta description length. No harm in going over, just not the best case scenario.
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