Changing Meta Description Often - Good or Bad?

I'm in the process of building an e-commerce website. Do you think having data in the meta description that keeps changing every now and then is good for SEO.

An example of my description will look something like,

"Read the complete review of PRODUCT_NAME. The lowest price of the product is PRICE_LOW sourced from STORE_NUM online stores newly updated."

Now the values, PRODUCT_NAME, STORE_NUM, & PRICE_LOW keeps changing as the content in the page changes.

For instance, if the lowest price of the product is RS. 1000 on 6th Sep 2013 and it drops to Rs. 500 after a week, is it okay to change the value in the meta?

Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing?

 

I don't think that's a good thing. It's good for sites to have new content regularly, but if you keep changing the content on your pages, and especially the Title tag, then you're just confusing the search engines. The pages would probably just remain in a constant state of flux in the search results.

 

Seeing as Meta Description has no influence on ranking, you've nothing to lose by changing it often. But the rate at which Google reflects those changes is totally up to them.

 

Google does not use meta tags for ranking, but I personally thinks its a wate of time rather than something to work on. Make it appealing to potential visitors and leave it.

 

As Cone Man said in the previous post, Meta Descriptions do not have any influence on the ranking of the posts. When your site has good indexing rate, the meta data's are also refreshed at once. I have observed it when i change the meta details (title/description) due to an error made by the Content writer.

I have seen some websites changing their title once every year eg: Latest US Job vacancies 2013
They change the year and so far i have not seen any problem in their rankings. So, go ahead but try to file in your results here so that it will help the forum

 

It won't have a negative affect on ur ranking but it isn't advisable

 

I think you have to make your desc and meta tags unique and impressive.

 

Why is it, then, that in Webmaster tools --> HTML Improvements the search engine complains if the metal description is too short, too long or a duplicate?

wiz

 

Maybe in a small hope of distracting you from real SEO, i.e. buying links instead of using Adwords?!

About the initial question, I doubt you will get a penalty for changing the meta tags often, actually it could help a bit if they respond to your content and are being re-indexed regularly enough.
One of my ex affiliate programs were used to do so - changing their title tag to the best selling/most popular tickets at the moment.

 

Yes it shouldn't be too long as it will be marked as spam by google ...don't what's wrong with google first they say they don't consider meta description in ranking and afterr all this

 

i dont think so it will effect on your ranking but made changes some time help good luck.

 

Hello,
I think meta description do not have any influence on the ranking of the keywords. If your website has high indexing rate, then to increase the CTR you have to change meta description. High CTR will increase your business ROI. Whenever we have change the meta description then there will some difference in CTR. So I will suggest if your CTR is low and website keywords have good ranking then change your meta description.

Otherwise no need to change it so frequently. Hope you understood.

 

Well, just in case, write a good one, relevant to the page content and stick with it as long as the content is not changed.
I never trusted all of Google's public statements for good reason. Specially concerning the meta description, strange occurrences are observed in the SERPS. Isn't everyone and his parrot telling us the "meta-dis" has to be limited to 150 chars, that's what Google shows?
Lately I see appearing pages with 199 chars (+spaces). Can't explain until now how or with what this is correlated, but it looks like a game changer at work.

 

I've always thought that your meta tags, and description should stay fairly consistent but you always want to make sure you can somehow grab the person who is going to see your description. All in all that will make a difference because even if you do show up on the 1st page of Google you need to control if people are clicking your site or not.

Thanks

 

There are much more things to do in SEO, except changing meta description.

 

I guess too often is not good

 

Meta descriptions is always good to change but content of page and meta description need to relevant each other.

 

The description meta tags serve to provide searches with a summary of what your page has to offer. It's a great place for a call to action and gives them a taste of what lies ahead. It may not have any influence on your position within the search results, but it does influence your click through rate and serves to draw people's attention to your page.

On a side note, click through rates are important to google adwords. This factor does have an impact on ad positioning. Adwords helps advertisers make strong, relevant, descriptions. This seems to be important to Google as it serves to help the user. With that example, I'm stating that a description is for the user that will see it. Make your descriptions whatever you feel will make your users click your link, but at the same time, keep it relevant to the actual page. Relevancy is everything to search engines and the people using them.

Descriptions are used in Bing and Yahoo as a factor in page relevancy. As for Google though, they've been enhancing the way your pages appear on the search engines and the description is their for display. It becomes an influence, not a factor.

With frequent changes to descriptions, I feel tempted to ask what makes you want to change them. If it's a page that gets updated often, then it sounds like a good idea to update the description as soon as the changes are made. But, if it's a page that never gets updated, I don't see the point of updating.

Now with your example, it sounds like a good idea to change the description because it's an accuracy change. It would be false advertising to have a price on the page lower than what's being described in the page description. Your description should be as relevant to your page as possible. Customers appreciate accuracy. If your descriptions were inaccurate, you would lose clicks. People may consider your website spammy.

 

doesn't matter if you change your meta content.

 

Good because google dosent count them anyway