I’m starting to believe that meta description tags are no longer worth bothering with. Now a lot of SEO people will throwing a small fit reading this but hear me out and I’ll try and win you round.
Previously I have always tried to add relevant meta descriptions to the majority of my websites and projects to help encourage click throughs from listings within search engines. So for example I would add something like “…cheapest deals on mobile phones…” or something along similar lines to catch the eye and make the listing more appealing. But now search engines are starting to pull relevant information from your webpage and use this text as your description and this has a few advantages.
Firstly if you wrote a meta description all about blue widgets and someone is searching for blue widgets and spots your meta description then everything should work perfectly. But if your webpage also sells red widgets and yellow widgets and people search for these terms then there will be no mention of these in your search listing description. But without a meta description tag the search engines will pull some relevant text from your webpage and will show what would be a more targeted description in your listing. This also means that the keywords in your listing description will be bolded making it stand out more.
I don’t believe that meta descriptions have any weight at all in search engine rankings so I doubt there would be any effect to your positions if you remove the tag. The one thing to make this work is that you have to have good content on your webpage which will provide the search engines with enough information to create a listing description from. Of course in SEO, the first thing you advise a client is to get the content right so this bears even more importance if you are to rely on the method above.
So it is something I will be keeping a close eye on in the coming months and deciding whether my sites benefit from removing meta tags and if it is something I will advise future clients about.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I personally think there’s more benefit to taking the couple of seconds writing the metas than removing them altogether, particularly when you remember that Google isn’t the only SE out there and other SEs do factor in the meta descriptions. It doesn’t take any time at all to write (particularly if they’re dynamically generated) and is one of the many little things you can do to optimise your site. Not a big thing by any means, but there’s more benefit than harm by using them.
March 21st, 2008 at 11:06 am
There are 2 issue with meta descriptions, 1 is what the search engine reads, and I think with a well constructed page they become useless. e.g.:
http://www.stephenpratley.com/seo-theme-for-cubecart/
The other is what Google displays in it’s SERPs when no description is found. Being able to write a description that entices a higher CTR is probably the biggest benefit.