Ok, this is an odd one. A person that I work with who has in the past come up with some cutting edge stuff, and also come up with some really weird non-functional stuff. Normally all it takes is a quick search to prove him wrong and the weird stuff. This time, I need to take it to the professionals! Here is the thing, in a normal page, you would have: <title></title> <meta name="description" content="Description" /> <meta name="Keywords" content="keywords"/> You can also have a load of other meta tags, but the above are the main ones, agreed? The guy that I am talking about has come up with the idea that this is more powerful: <title></title> <meta name="description" content="Description" /> <meta name="Keywords" content="keywords"/> <meta name="description" content="Another description tag" /> Yes, that is what I mean by two description tags on one page. I think that the second tag is a waste of space. I pointed out that there was no one else in the world doing it. He said that that was because this was too advanced – I kid you not. I have something in the back of my brain which says that if for some reason you had two of the same kind of tag, the search engine would only read the first one of its kind. Can anyone confirm this? Or is this really a technique so far advanced that everyone should be doing it? Only you can say. So, what do you guys think?
The meta description is hardly used by Google at all, so having two of them isn't going to help any more than having one of them. The text on the page, that all visitors see if valued much more than the meta description, so there's really not much point in this at all.
yes if a site has two title, description and keywords meta tags then that site is not searched by any search engine. _______________ cure trigger finger hong kong
Here's my take on it... 1) Google doesn't even consider meta description as a ranking factor in their algorithm. Like the meta keywords element, the meta description is ignored when ranking a URL. It's too susceptible to spam since it's not an HTML element that gets displayed on the page. Meta description optimization IS still important at Google even... because it's displayed as the snippet in the SERPs assuming all keywords from the search phrase exist in the meta description. 2) I doubt VERY seriously that having two (or even three or four) meta descriptions in your HTML will have any negative affect on your rankings. They are not going to drop your page from their index just because it has two meta description elements. This could be the result of legitimate mistakes in page templates and such... So I don't think doing so will invoke any type of penalization. I haven't tried it but I'd be willing to bet that an HTML document w/ 2 meta descriptions will actually validate. 3) It probably depends on the engine as to whether they will consider the 1st or last meta description as the "official" page description... or possibly handles and alternates between showing both. When I optimize meta descriptions I always try to work EVERY keyword from the keyword phrases in the <title> into my meta description. Why? Because when Google chooses the search snippet, they first look to see if all keywords in the search phrase exist in the meta description. If the meta description contains all keywords from the search phrase and the meta description is not extremely short then they will show the meta description as the snippet. If all of the keyword search phrase do NOT appear in the meta description and/or the meta description is short then Google will typically construct their own snippet from sentence fragments containing those keywords from various parts of the page. Their goal is to be able to highlight (bold) EVERY keyword from the search phrase within the Google snippet. So by making sure that in MOST cases you have the keywords from the search phrase in the meta description, you can maximize the number of times your well optimized (for click-thru) meta description is shown and minimize the number of times that Google constructs less than optimal snippets from random text on the page. And how do you do this? If the page is well optimized, the title element will contain the keyword phrase(s) most often used to find the page. By including all keywords from the title element in your meta description, you should be covering most searches where your page is found in the SERPs. PS: It would be a cool test to have 2 meta descriptions... One that had keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 in it... the 2nd one with keyword1, keyword2, keyword4 (assuming you have a page that ranks relatively well for both the phrases "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" and "keyword1 keyword2 keyword4". And then search for "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" and see if they display the 1st meta description. Then search for "keyword1 keyword2 keyword4" and see if they display the 2nd meta description. I wouldn't be surprised if Google showed them both as snippets depending on which search phrase was used. It would likely depend on how they store the meta descriptions. I would be surprised if their index were hardcoded with a single meta description field with some fixed length. Their representation of your html document is more likely some type of data structure that is more generic and allows for any number of any types of elements similar to a binary tree but allowing many child nodes per parent instead of just 2. But who knows. The test I mentioned above should be quite revealing.