Last week, Google announced the extension of search snippets in the Google search. They also passed on the information via Danny Sullivan, a California-based technologist and journalist, that there is no requirement to update the meta description to support longer search result snippets. They said Google can handle dynamic thing like this one.
John Mueller, a Google official said that “Essentially from from a purely technical point of view these descriptions aren’t a ranking for anything. So it’s not the case that changing your descriptions or making them longer or shorter or tweaking them or putting keywords in there will affect your site’s ranking. However it can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site.”
Meta descriptions are not always used by Google. It all depends on the search query conducted as well as the page content. However, update them if you want to have full control over them.
John Meuller elaborated this in the latest Google webmaster hangout, starting at the 29.41 mark.
