Quadrille - 3:32 pm on Jun 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

I respectfully disagree with malachite.

Recently, meta descriptions have become very important to Google; pages with none are often dropped; pages with non-unique descriptions are made supplementary. I believe malachite's problem is a different one.

For example, no-one (except a webmaster) searches for 'domain.com', so looking at that serp will not give you a clue as to what the 'typical searcher' is seeing.

Descriptions should reflect the page content, include rlevant key words, for two reasons:

1. Google likes it that way, and a happy Google smiles on you - like it or lump it :)

2. The text that appears in the serps depends 80%* on the search term - if the meta description it, then the meta description is likely to be used. If not, then it is most unlikely to be used.

20%* is down to which datacenter the search utilized - some may prefer the ODP description (where there is one), one or two may ignore both.

*Percentages are speculative; contents may settle during transit.