More Description Lines Showing Up In Organic Results?
Update: Barry Schwartz over at SER notes that there was a sphinn 5 days ago on the very same subject. 
Barry also noted his updates on the subject in 2006 and in September of 2008. I definitely try to stay on topic with ppc here at QualityScores, sometimes my curiosity gets the best of me though. Thanks to all who pinged and commented with very helpful links and related blog posts. I would still like to know if we can start making uber long descriptions in our meta tags or will it be considered spam?
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I just started noticing this tonight…how long has this been going on? What determines when a result will have 1 or 4 description lines? Thoughts? Please see this screen shot…it’s a big file/image – please click to see the big picture:
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I still get two description lines for the very same search query. Additionally I get only approx. 4000 results while you get 32000…
Hi Eric…I was wondering if others could replicate. Thanks for the comment! I’m running through all of my ff add-ons right now to see if they could have any effect…but I doubt it. I tried several longer tail and shorter tail queries last night and on almost every longer tail query I saw 2, 3 and 4 description lines.
I was sent this link which is mirroring your findings – http://holisticsearch.co.uk/2008/12/28/the-impact-of-longer-snippets-on-seo/
Hi Rishil! Awesome find – thank you for sharing and commenting! – I looked for quite some time last night for anybody else that has seen this. Fantastic explanation at that link you provided. I wonder if this started in the UK as a beta or alpha and it has now expanded to the US or worldwide for longer tail queries? Maybe a late alpha stage or early beta?
Very interesting, I was curious to why this was, thanks for your link Rishil.