How many characters are to many for meta Description

[vjboc]

How many characters are to many for meta Description? I read where you should have no more than 200. Is this true or does it matter?
It also says that there should be no more than 100 urls. is this true?

[tryinhere]

title = 70 chars
description = 160 chars

as a guide

[retsek]

If your site is showing the date in serps, it will be limited to about 140 characters.

There's no rule anywhere about links per page. It's just common best practice to not have more than 100.

Look at major websites and newspapers. They sometimes have have more that 100 internal links on their homepage. On these major sites, it maybe effective for them since they have alot Link Juice flowing to the homepage via external sources. On smaller sites with less authority and link juice, not so much.

[eurekapsycrille]

Actually, there is no specific number of characters "needed" in writing a meta description. Quoted by High Rankings:

"Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you're not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway."

See? But the most advisable is 20 to 25 characters. Make sure to make a relevant and good meta description. For more info, you could visit this site:

How to Create a Meta Description Tag for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

[vjboc]

Thanks for the fast responses. Actually they way I have my meta description set up is; Product name, Description from page, and category. Which in some cases is 1000 + Characters. I should probably change it to Product name and Category.
If I set the meta description to "Product name and Category" it will match alot of the title. Is this OK?

[mikest4u]

Well 1000 Character for Description is more then Enough! Try To Reduce Them! Most Search Engine Recommends Title: 60 Characters Long While Description should be 156 - 166 Characters Long!

[Ryan0111]

Make your meta tags description to 160 characters..

[outwest]

Meta description? dont need it, Google picks up the title off your <h1> tags, then the first typing on your blog or site shows up as the description. I thought "meta description " was very old school

[John Romaine]

For which search engine???????????????

Title Tag and Meta Description Length for Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask

[Maraun]

The purpose of the meta description is to give the user an idea of what to expect when they get to your page. People will READ it.

The meta description is the ad copy of your SERP entry. Some people will click by title alone, some will read the snippet below the title and decide if that is what they were looking for.

So keep it short, make it enticing, maybe even include a call to action (read more, click here etc). Google doesn't show more than 160 characters of your meta description. If you write more it will just be cut off and display as "Click he..." and then it ends. Maybe they don't cut midword - I'm not sure right now - but you know what I mean.