Meta Descriptions - what happens if you lift from your content

[c41lum]

Hi guys i have been developing websites for a long time now but I have always wondered if:

Lifting on page content and using it as my meta description is having a effect on my search rankings. i.e the first paragraph of my site says "Blue Widgets can normally be found in blue widget land hiding under rocks." I then use this first paragraph as my meta description.

Will doing this effect my ranking within G and Y.

Thanks for any advice you can offer on this matter.

[c41lum]

Basically can you copy a paragraph out of the content on the page and put it in the meta description ?

If you do this, is it bad practice and would it effect your ranking in G?

[TheMadScientist]

AFAIK the meta description has little to 0 value for rankings currently, so it should not be a direct issue, but with 'personalization' of search results clicks IMO are a big deal, making the description indirectly important. If you can attract clicks by using info on the page then IMO you should be fine...

[wheel]

I don't know from a ranking standpoint, but I always reuse words from my content in the description - but right it in such a way that it's clickable. Remember that Google will commonly use this tag as the text of your snippet in the results - so write for the user to click on it.

[HuskyPup]

Basically can you copy a paragraph out of the content on the page and put it in the meta description ?

I do that all the time for my widgets using the most important details of the widget and they nearly all rank #1 with nearly all the SERPs showing both the titlebar and the description snippet.

I usually keep it down to about 20-25 words maximum.

[c41lum]

hi husky pup, im taking the whole first sentence of my content and using as my meta description. At the min im not tweaking it in any way.

[FranticFish]

As people have said, the description tag is important - even more nowadays with personalisation. Using the first sentence of the content is fine - so long as that first sentence is a killer lead in to the article featuring the main terms that the page itself is targeting.

[HuskyPup]

^^^What FranticFish wrote^^^

so long as that first sentence is a killer lead

[webboy1]

I also use content (slightly tweaked) from on page within the meta descriptions of sites I work on and have never seen ill effect from doing so.

However, like the folks above suggest, the decsription tags is what Google displays in the results so it's better to tweak to make it attractive to the user, encouraging them to click.