News Courtesy of Yoast.com:
A few months ago Google changed the length of the meta description from 160 to 320 characters. This caused quite a buzz in the SEO community and a lot of people wanted to know whether they should change their own crafted meta descriptions. In the meantime, we already changed the length of the meta description in the Yoast SEO plugin, but we also wanted to investigate this change more thoroughly. So, we started our own research! It appears that Google very often creates a meta description by itself, based on the first paragraph of your article.
As an avid Yoast SEO user, I always make sure to fill out the meta description for pages and posts. The goal is to always get the indicator bar within the green. Sure, Google can and will generate meta descriptions for your pages from the content on them. However, if you have a page which can’t really be tailored for SEO, You might see that page indexed with garbled code. Pages for content such as galleries, portfolios, and reviews tend to have snippets of information here and there. Google has no way of telling what the most important piece of content is.
When writing for a content-heavy page it is important to treat the introduction paragraph as an excerpt. While you can control what excerpts are displayed for your WordPress blog posts, you can’t guarantee that Google will apply your meta description. On precisiondigital-llc.com it does appear that Google is, for the most part, respecting my meta description entries. This is very evident now as many were written with the 160 character limit and look a little short compared to other Google results. The auto-generated archive and tag pages seem to display text from previous posts. Not really ideal but I wasn’t expecting them to be indexed anyhow.
