--- title: "Meta description length outside 50–160 characters (seo/meta-description-length)" description: "seo/meta-description-length: Google truncates long descriptions and may ignore very short ones in favour of page text." canonical: https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/meta-description-length lastModified: 2026-09-16 --- # Meta description length outside 50–160 characters `seo/meta-description-length` · severity **warn** · category SEO · detected by `void seo` and `void audit` ## Why it matters Google truncates long descriptions and may ignore very short ones in favour of page text. This is a heuristic, not a Google limit. ## How to fix it Summarise the page in one or two sentences of about 50–160 characters. ## References - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet ## More seo rules `void seo` reports 60 rules in this category. What search engines need from the raw response: status codes, titles and descriptions in , self-referencing canonicals, one h1, crawlable links, Open Graph, icons, robots.txt and a sitemap with real dates. - `charset` Character encoding not declared early — [seo/charset](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/charset) - `title-missing` No single non-empty in <head> — [seo/title-missing](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/title-missing) - `title-length` Title length outside 10–60 characters, or keyword-stuffed — [seo/title-length](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/title-length) - `meta-description-missing` No meta description in <head> — [seo/meta-description-missing](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/meta-description-missing) - `metadata-in-body` Crawler receives <title>/canonical/description inside <body> (Next.js streaming metadata) — [seo/metadata-in-body](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/metadata-in-body) - `canonical-missing` No single rel=canonical in <head> — [seo/canonical-missing](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/canonical-missing) - `canonical-invalid` Canonical URL is relative or contains a fragment — [seo/canonical-invalid](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/canonical-invalid) - `canonical-broken` Canonical points to a URL that returns 4xx/5xx — [seo/canonical-broken](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/canonical-broken) Detected by `void seo` and `void audit`. Explain it in a terminal: `void rules seo/meta-description-length`