Meta description length too long
This means that the URL in question has a meta description with too many characters.
Why is this important?
The meta description is considered important to help users quickly understand what content they can expect to find on the page, when clicking through from the search engine results page. Well written meta descriptions typically achieve a better click-through-rate.
If the meta description uses too many characters, this may represent a missed optimization opportunity.
What does the Hint check?
By default, this Hint will trigger for any internal URL which contains a meta description with more than 320 characters.
Note: the threshold values used for this Hint can be changed in the global settings.
Examples that trigger this Hint
The Hint would trigger for any URL with a meta description that has character length of 321 or more:
Why is this Hint marked 'Opportunity'?
In Sitebulb, this Hint is an Opportunity, as it represents a situation where you could optimize the site to potentially gain more search traffic.
Description length is highly subjective, and sometimes you need a lot of words to communicate meaning.
However, this Hint exists to highlight instances where this may not be the case. It allows you to quickly check a list of URLs with long meta descriptions, in case you see some examples which do not look right, such as pages which inherit template properties and have not been updated.
Further Reading
