: Does it matter if my meta description is truncated? So I'm programmatically generating meta descriptions from the first 160 characters of my site's product listing descriptions. (I'm putting a

@Margaret670

Actually Google own support.google.com doc pages using auto generated meta description. Also the words are not truncated properly. In most of cases Google ignore your meta description when user query does not match with your current meta description. For example in above doc the meta description is this


The payment methods available to you depend on your currency and
country. In most countries, you can set up a credit card, debit card,
or bank account as a primary payment method. You can also set u


Now if I type this query on Google search "how to change my payment details in google cloud" then it will not going to display same meta description for same page, instead they will generate it automatically. And that is why many of people who have large amount of webpages use auto generated meta description. But a good hand-written description may increase CTR(Click through rate from search result), for example if you know there are some query who gives you the most traffic to your site, so based on that query, if you write good meta description then you may get better CTR. But it is purely based on user, because I have seen many people just read your title and not meta description. So it is your choice to what to optimize for better CTR.

Regarding ranking they don't use meta description in ranking factor.


Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets
we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.


Here is also good answer written by stephen about meta description.

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