How long should a Schema.org "description" be?

Question

Is there any character limit or even suggested character limit for using Schema.org’s description property? For example, in Microdata: itemprop="description"

The Schema.org website reads, "A short description of the item.", but doesn’t specify what it considers short.

Solution

There is no character cap on the usage of itemprop description. The whole point of Schema is to provide correct additional information. By introducing a cap they would be defeating this objective. What they recommend is merely a recommedation and in otherwords they are informing you not to use words that don't describe what the item is about.

For example:

If you have an article about Car Manufacturing in 1990, talks about the company ford and the inventor then your description should be something like:

"A in depth look at Ford Car Manufacturing in the 1990s and the inventor William ford"

A bad description would be something like

"Ford was known for manufacturing the best cars in the 1990's, find out about how William ford made the best cars"

Large sentences generally have lots of , and . ideally you should only ever have one full stop and if possible avoid commas and then you can't go wrong.

Comments

[John Conde]

This shouldn't be more than a sentence or two long.

[Ryan]

@JohnConde right now its 49 words, 2 lengthy sentences which includes an itemprop='manufacturer' inside of it. Would that be okay? By character its 375 characters long.

[Ryan]

Thanks @bybe if you post as answer and the community seems to agree I'll make it accepted.

[Ryan]

Perhaps I'm confused in the first description, you're describing the article not a product. For example would something like, The Ford Fiesta is the top-ranked, small car for the last 4 years. Completely redesigned it offers excellent handling, speed, and luxury. be an acceptable Schema description?

[Simon Hayter]

Well it depends, really you only want to describe what the article is about.. not what directly is in the article if that makes sense. So in your article if you refer to Ford being the best then this is something they find out when reading the article not the description.. It should attribute what the article is about. If it was comparing Ford to Nissan then you could have an description a look at why ford is better than Nissan because this focuses in what its about, you wouldn't say ford is better because it has this and that.

[Ryan]

This isn't an article though or a blog. Its a website for a manufacturing company. We have 3 main products. On our products page we have the name of each along with a short description of each. Then a link to a product specific page with more information.

[Simon Hayter]

You could use something like product information about 'make' 'model' or you could use product information about ``make model and some additional information`` or you could use ``make 'model' 'some features'` It's important to note that all methods are valid.. You should use one that makes sense with your page layout too.. Take a look at ebuyer.com/399222-quadcopter-black-white-h107eby they use the specifications as the description while

[Ryan]

I just dropped it into the Google Rich Snippet tester and it did find all of my data how I have it laid out but cropped the description. I'm going to try to do more testing and on Bing to see if I can find a common character/word cap.