Hi Max,
We were a bit late to the scene, but I wanted to do it right 🙂
When it’s in the yellow (marked as too long), it’s up to you to discover whether the descriptions are truncated in your target market’s search results. This is a hefty task, especially when dealing with so many products.
Some (more popular) products might have their full description length displayed regardless–this may happen as long as it isn’t in the red.
Now, I don’t think changing and over-optimizing every single product will increase the click-through rate. But, this is also something for you to discover in the search engine result pages.
In the end, these changes in the search engines will be a never-ending maintenance job for webmasters. For your sanity, I advise against going over each product to fix the descriptions. Even more so, the horizontal ellipsis (…) might invite visitors to come over to “…read more”, which would’ve been the case for a few months already.
That said: The description meta tags don’t affect ranking.
However, a misleading description might increase bounce rate, and you’ll rank lower. A bad description might decrease the click-through rate, and you’ll rank lower, too.
In contrast, a good and inviting description–which leads to high-quality content–might grab non-bouncing users, and you’ll rank higher.’
To conclude:
Descriptions with ellipsis might even be beneficial. But, you’ll only know after performing an analytical investigation. So, don’t go on a rampage changing them, research which pages need improving first, and go by them on a per-case basis.
