Google: Meta descriptions important but do NOT affect ranking

minstrel Illustrious Member

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#1

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover
by Raj Krishnan, Google Snippets Team
Thu, Sep 27 2007
The quality of your snippet â€” the short text preview we display for each web result â€” can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="informative description here">
Code (markup):
Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

What are some good meta description strategies?

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description. he meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information -- price, age, manufacturer -- scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together.

Not as desirable:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="[domain name redacted]
: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPrÃ© by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPrÃ©">
Code (markup):
There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn't work well as a snippet on our search results page:

The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.

Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPrÃ© are each listed twice).

None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPrÃ©?

The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page -- who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet -- is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.

Much nicer:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPrÃ©, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages">
Code (markup):
What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.

Programmatically generate descriptions
For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation.

Use quality descriptions
Finally, make sure your descriptions are... descriptive. It's easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they're not directly visible in the UI for your site's visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results -- if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That's likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.
Click to expand...

minstrel, Nov 24, 2007 IP

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linkmanager Well-Known Member

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#2

Nice stufff. thx for sharing... REP+

linkmanager, Nov 24, 2007 IP

SJappie Peon

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#3

Good stuff. I might take this into account when updating my meta descriptions

SJappie, Nov 24, 2007 IP

yokolucu Well-Known Member

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#4

thank you for great info.That will close a lot of debates about description meta tag

yokolucu, Nov 24, 2007 IP

slihta Peon

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#5

tnx , i think keywords is the most important think !

slihta, Nov 24, 2007 IP

ForgottenCreature Notable Member

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#6

Thank you for the information buddy!

ForgottenCreature, Nov 24, 2007 IP

minstrel Illustrious Member

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#7

slihta said: ↑

tnx , i think keywords is the most important think !
Click to expand...

If you mean the meta keywords tag, no - that's one of the least important things.

minstrel, Nov 24, 2007 IP

slihta Peon

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#8

i means keywords in site`s text !

slihta, Nov 24, 2007 IP

Small Fry Peon

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#9

Thanks, you always post the good stuff. I hsve to get around to reading all your posts one year.

Small Fry, Nov 24, 2007 IP

minstrel likes this.

Shakas Well-Known Member

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#10

Thanks for the information. Nice to share

Shakas, Nov 24, 2007 IP

shimlad Guest

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#11

cool thanks

shimlad, Nov 27, 2007 IP

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Google: Meta descriptions important but do NOT affect ranking

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