Google and Meta Description

Does google care for it

[getvisibleuk]

I was recently sent this article from a client who was sent it by someone interested in SEO (I use "interested" rather than "expert".

[traffick.com ]

The premise is that google doesn't really care for them and why should we bother?

I replied that Google uses it in the SERPS which helps convert views of the site's rank to actual visits. Furthermore, there is no clear-cut proof that it does ignore the description. If it uses it, its there, if it doesn't, then it matters to other search engines.

What are your views?

Cheers,

GetVisibleUK

[DaveN]

Google tends to use a snippet from websites body text.

but for that 10 seconds worth of coding to add the meta's why not ;)
DaveN

[fathom]

Agree with DaveN.

It is still used but less weight, and normally only when nothing else substantial is available... e.g. like a Flash web site/page.

[chiyo]

I use very short meta-tags. But not really for google. There is a mass of robots and indexers out there, many of whom do use them, at least in part. For example, there are a few magazine and news aggregator sites that crawl our pages that ask for these tags to be present. I am sure there are others.

Main problem is that metattags were invented when the web was primarily an academic, research and government documents vehicle. Metatags were invented for librarians who were used to "keywording" documents for better content retrieval. When the web commercialised, and our old "objective" document coders became very much the minority, it became a major repository of spam.

Search engines now have the capability of finding out what your document is about by themselves, using such things as citations from other sources and sophisticated keyword analysis far beyond the capability of a librarian sitting in an office.

Its just that metatags like desc and keywords have been made almost both redundant and useless for document indexing and retrieval by the new breed of commercial publishers with no code of ethics or professional guidelines like librarians have. Thats no criticism of web publishers like all of us. It just a method that has outlived its usefulness as the Web changes.

[NickH]

Google does sometimes use the meta description in the SERPS -- it is doing so at the moment on my pages. It wasn't using it earlier in the month, so I shortened it (to 118 characters) in the hope that it would. Of course, I can't be sure shortening it made the difference...

[Grumpus]

I have also been fond of my theory that Google uses the Meta Tags (if available) to help determine "theming" of pages and sites. I don't think it really effects ranking (except in a very broad and roundabout way), but what it does do is enable for "clustering" parts of the algo. If site A links to B and they both have one or more matching "keywords" in the meta tag, then the sites are similar and should appear close together in the SERPS. (It may also affect "similar sites" too, but to a lesser extent).

I think they also use it as a part of their Spam Detection algo. If there are keywords in the Meta that don't appear on the page, then the person is using some "old school" SEO tricks (or is just a lazy designer). Just how much this comes into play, though, is questionable.

G.