jimbeetle - 2:45 pm on Jul 18, 2008 (gmt 0)

If you omit the META and assuming you have decent text on the page, does this mean that because the text is longer and thus potentially more relevant because of the increase in key-phrases, that you could potentially rank better in more searches by omitting the META tag altogether?

Not really. As Ted stated above, the meta description is not used for ranking purposes, but is, in some cases, used to generate the snippet. If used as the snippet, a solid description could help increase click through rate.

And to go on a bit. As far as we know, the way Google works (simplified), is to select a set of candidate results, run them through it's filters and whatever else it does upon serving, and then combine them with the snippets (which come from a different bucket), as it spits out the final results.

So basically, the only part the snippet plays is in what is presented to the user.