Few weeks back, i had a page where it was gradually moving up in the SERP (I mean.. positive growth)..... when it was moving well.... the page had a very short description.... Though i did not get enough clicks despite being on first page (I know the position in the first page also matters).... So i thought of improving the CTR by changing the description..... This time the description got a little bigger.... And now my SERP position is gradually moving down.... (This is the only change i did for that page............) So my question is .... does the length of the description matters ?
Description length has little/no effect, as long as it is just well-written, not too stuffed with keywords, etc. Keep those important details at front for there is only certain number of characters being shown on Google search result.
But it's not good to have more than 150 characters in your description. Keep it short and well informative about your site.
I do not believe that you can tie your change of description to the change in rankings. Google deliberately delays changes in rank. If they did not, we could make a change today and see the immediate effect. Then we would make another change tomorrow and see the effect of that. In about a month, we would all know exactly what helps and what hurts. Game over. Also, it may be the only change you made *on-page* but off-page factors change continuously. So again, you can't associate your description change to a change in rank (assuming you did nothing extraordinary).
Google does not even consider the meta description (or meta keywords) when ranking a page, so changing the meta description had no impact on rankings. It's likely due to something else. A well optimized meta description can impact click-thru-rates IF you can get it to show as the Google snippet.
If you have changed possition of your keywords in description this could influence your ranking in serps in my opinion.
+rep for that post! I was always wondering why my page took so much time to improve in ranking, when I was backlinking like crazy, and creating many articles! Sometimes I would get so frustrated that I decide to give up on the site. However, now I might wait and see how my SERP changes in the future
Although there are limits in the number of characters in description but it has only a little effect in the serp ranking. Your ranking will probably going down because you changed the information of your site and spider needs to reindex it again.