Is Google ignoring your meta descriptions?

SEOMadHatter

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How long do you spend writing meta descriptions for your blog posts and product pages?

No matter how long you’re spending, it might all be a waste of time.

The importance of meta descriptions is just another SEO debate making noise in SEO Facebook groups and everywhere else SEOs can find a platform to debate things – but it’s a relevant debate.

However, rather than reading opinions on Facebook groups, you could just have a look at this research done by Evan Hall at Portent and let the data do the talking.

They used a list of 30,000 keywords taken from their clients with brand terms filtered out. They then entered the keywords into STAT Search Analytics and pulled rankings for both desktop and mobile search results.

The goal? To find out if Google’s actually using the meta descriptions you’re writing.

Here are some results of the research:

  • First-page rewrite rate: 71% for mobile and 68% for desktop. In other words, Google uses the meta description tag for the snippet around 30% of the time when the page ranks on the first page.
  • Rewrite rate by search volume: the higher the search volume of the keyword, the less likely Google is to rewrite the meta description.
  • Rewrite rate by query length: like search volume, long-tail queries tend to have search result snippets that don’t use the page’s meta description.
These are just some of the different stats you can find in Evan’s article.

But you’re probably wondering what you should do with your own meta descriptions.

As Evan says, you shouldn’t give up on writing good meta descriptions. But, you can just be smart about it.

For example, as per the study, if you’re targeting high search volume keywords, it is better that you put more time in coming up with a better meta description.

And for more scenarios, just give a look at the stats in the research.


Yep, this is a complete copy paste from Stacked Marketer today but I was actually going to post about this the other day. I though it was maybe because I've been spending so much of my time in longtails lately but I've mostly stopped bothering with the meta description.

I was comparing some rankings lately from old freelance writers from sometime last year. One writer practiced good technical SEO and had the keywords in the meta etc... The other was a better writer but a worse SEO. Looking at the rankings Google's picked up on interesting bits from the better writer to use in the SERP and those pieces are doing much better.

Just because Google isn't showing the meta description in the SERP doesn't mean they're completely ignoring it but I know I'm certainly paying less attention to it.
 
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Yeah i don't bust my ass anymore over meta descriptions. Lets the engine handle it, they know what people want to click.
 
Well, these are the special tags Google recognise
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
 
Yeah i don't bust my ass anymore over meta descriptions. Lets the engine handle it, they know what people want to click.

I'd be curious to see how often they change the text they use.

If it was up to us I think I'd still rather have a say in what description shows up. When your competitors sucked you knew you could get a better looking CTR but at least it's one less job to do when publishing.

Well, these are the special tags Google recognise
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

Sure, I'm not suggesting they've forgotten what meta descriptions are but they're certainly using them a lot less.
 
Content is much more important then meta tags. Now google is smart and don't work like in the past, back then was learning from tags, but now i think that meta tags just doesn't matter at all.
 
I'd be curious to see how often they change the text they use.

If it was up to us I think I'd still rather have a say in what description shows up. When your competitors sucked you knew you could get a better-looking CTR but at least it's one less job to do when publishing.
It's just the usual. When was the last time you had a say in what you needed to do to rank? We're just along for the algorithmic ride being tossed around like a boat in a storm holding on for dear life.
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Content is much more important then meta tags. Now google is smart and don't work like in the past, back then was learning from tags, but now i think that meta tags just doesn't matter at all.

I checked my top 20 keywords for a ranking site and there's still a couple using the tag I wrote which is going to get a better CTR than the alternatives for that search. Not sure it doesn't matter at all but it's certainly not what it once was.

Going forward I don't think I'll set the tag anymore but I'll write the initial sentence with the assumption it might get picked up like 20% of the time as the description. That part needs to be well written anyway.
 
I stopped using meta description as google will put what's relevant to the search. Noticed no difference in ranking or traffic
 
In my experience, it depends on the type of content. If your page has plenty of text content and can provide good and concise answers to the user queries then you might don't need to write a meta description for that page. But if your content isn't so concise that Google can understand and extract the answer easily from there, have a good brief summary is good.

This is even more true if your content is mostly images or videos. Google cannot read them. So what does Google use to understand the content on the page? They are titles & meta tags.

Also, I think it has something to do with UX and CTR. I don't know about you, but when I search for something on Google, I usually click on results that have my queries highlighted in their meta description.

I often get good results when optimizing meta tags.
 
Thanks for this, @SEOMadHatter. I was just stumped by this and made a post about it, yesterday.

Flip, sorry I hadn't noticed your post. I knew it was a thing but only noticed just how rampant it was yesterday when I actually started paying attention then I saw these stats this morning.

As far as forcing them to use your description it might be something they offer in the future as they do give people the option not to used for a snippet. For the moment it doesn't look like we have a say.

In my experience, it depends on the type of content. If your page has plenty of text content and can provide good and concise answers to the user queries then you might don't need to write a meta description for that page. But if your content isn't so concise that Google can understand and extract the answer easily from there, have a good brief summary is good.

This is even more true if your content is mostly images or videos. Google cannot read them. So what does Google use to understand the content on the page? They are titles & meta tags.

Also, I think it has something to do with UX and CTR. I don't know about you, but when I search for something on Google, I usually click on results that have my queries highlighted in their meta description.

I often get good results when optimizing meta tags.

I don't think it's quite as simple as whether or not Google understands the content. I'm looking at a bunch of my rankings at the moment and they're all 95% text, same structure from the same writer and they're all ranking so Google understands the content well enough to know what it's about. There are pages with the query in the meta which Google highlights while others have the exact same but Google decides to find something else.

I suspect as this is relatively new there's just a lot of testing going on and we won't know what they use until it happens.
 
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No. Google is not ignoring meta descriptions. It's true that a website's ranking may be affected by a few things that it does, but the content of a web page is not one of them.


Here are some other things which have been shown to affect rankings more than the content of any page: - The density and quality of backlinks from external sites, especially from websites related to your target keywords - Quality and quantity of inbound links from your own site - Product availability


For example, if you rank well for "what movie," then this would have no effect on how well you rank for "star wars."
 
No. Google is not ignoring meta descriptions. It's true that a website's ranking may be affected by a few things that it does, but the content of a web page is not one of them.


Here are some other things which have been shown to affect rankings more than the content of any page: - The density and quality of backlinks from external sites, especially from websites related to your target keywords - Quality and quantity of inbound links from your own site - Product availability


For example, if you rank well for "what movie," then this would have no effect on how well you rank for "star wars."

Sounds like it might have been a temporary issue back in Sep 2020
 
It's interesting that this post is originally from last year, but I hear people that are having the same question over and over again. The truth here is that meta descriptions never were a huge ranking factor, but they are significant as they are a great place to implement important keywords, and they will be shown on search queries right below the title of your page. So, it isn't something that you should neglect but don't expect to see a high organic ranking just by optimizing them properly. Backlinks, website speed, website structure, relevancy of your content, and other factors are what counts.
 
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