Search algorithm for letters used in meta description
SEO consultants recommend using the maximum number of letters allowed to be used in your web page meta description.
However if search engines such as Google actually take anything more into account than whether the number is exceeded or not then we all have big problems, because nothing is worse than filling space with unnecessary words. MSDN used to be like this and a search on any given topic yielded nothing more than a surreal description of a theory with no practical explanation of how it works.
And so it should be with meta descriptions. If a search engine is returning your description with its results, then do you want it to be more legible than gibberish... so the page designer or author should be the one that decides and not someone who is simply counting letter usage.
After all it is the author of the web site who knows best about the product. A typical example of where the alternative does not work is when a company hired a professional copywriter (not in-house) to revise all of the web pages on their site, check the grammar and make them more interesting to read. Well the end result was something that was nice to read but when it was tested against people who were not familiar with the product, they found that so much was lost that very few could get an inkling of what the product was about.
Is this what we are expected to do our product pages to appease a simpletons idea of search relevance?
