Does changing description for user content affect SERPs?

[Gissit]

Hi
One of the sites I run has a number of pages that list user supplied content. I currently populate the meta contents with some of the information from these user entries so the description tag is constantly changing and wondered if this is a bad thing.

Also, it is quite hard to deal with unique titles for these type of pages. Any sugestions?

As an example, think of it like a classified listing site where there are 100 pages of user adverts and each page has 100 listings (all for closely related but different products). I currently use a snippet of standard text and add part of the product title from the latest five entries to build the meta description
ie: Widgets for Sale 1 - 100, manuf-type 1, manuf-type 2, manuf-type 3, manuf-type 4, manuf-type 5

This means that there is duplication in part of the meta description at the beginning (Widgets for Sale) and the dynamic part of it will never be the same on two subsequent visits by the bots. I cant help thinking this is not good and am toying with removing the meta descriptions all together.

From this I end up with 100 pages that have meta descriptions that start Widgets for Sale nnn-nnn, ----unique relavant text----

The page titles are all - "Widgets for Sale 1 to 100", "Widgets for Sale 101 to 200" etc and this leaves me with almost duplicate titles and a similar dilema of how best to title the pages.

[tedster]

The meta description is used for indexing decisions, such as yes/no or supplemental vs. main index. It's also used, potentially at least, for snippet creation. But it is not used in the actual relevance scoring.

The page titles are all - "Widgets for Sale 1 to 100", "Widgets for Sale 101 to 200"

When it comes to ranking well, the page's title element is MUCH more important than any other on-page element. So your main focus should be getting good unique and descriptive titles in the source code, however you can.

The situation you describe is not good for you. Even with user provided data, you need title elements that are unique and descriptive to rank well and to draw in clicks from Google's SERPs.

[Gissit]

The only way I can see to get to unique and descriptive titles is to sub-categorize the listings into e.g. widgets type 1, widgets type 2 etc and this will make it quite easy then, but it is not ideal for the user as they will want to just browse widgets for sale and not widgets by model/manufacturer/whatever. The other worry is that effectively providing filtered lists of the same data will produce an amount of duplication in the page content.
I guess this is the best way really, I'm just trying to avoid having to write code to pick out widget models/types from user entered content.

[edited by: Gissit at 1:19 pm (utc) on April 1, 2008]

[tedster]

If your site has good traffic, then you might well not worry about these page titles. It certainly is one possible decision.