Google rolled out a couple of updates last week, and here’s my take on the first of them, and how it affects you. If you’re using a search engine optimisation consultancy, make sure you ask them how their advice to you is changing as a result.

The more instantly obvious of the changes concerns the description or “snippet” part of the results. Traditionally Google has served up the title of your page and then two secondary lines of text, which would be your meta description tag if that contained the user’s search term.

It looks like the maximum length of the snippets has increased from 160 characters to twice that number. But what does this all mean for us? The first question is: “Should I rewrite all my carefully-crafted 160-character meta description tags?” and our answer to that is no, because Google is still only going to show that much text on one- to three-word search queries, which are probably your most important ones. Even on the longer queries, it will still use the meta description tags, as the second example above shows - it’ll just augment them if necessary. But you do need to think more carefully if there are longer search queries which are important to you, and if there are, you need to ensure the words appear together at least on the page if not in the meta description tag or title.