Meta Description

....Doesn't matter?

[Skylo]

Simple question here everyone.
I have been told by a member here that the Meta Description does not have any relevance as far as SEO is concerned.
This is certainly not what i thought!
What does everyone else feel towards this apparent commonly accepted fact.

Happy Surfing

[encyclo]

Meta description is used as the snippet under the search result URL by some search engines, which is enough on it's own to merit it's use - as a true short description of the page/site, not as a keyword list. I believe the contents are considered in various algos out there too.

It is the over-abused meta keywords tag which has hardly any value (although apparently Yahoo Slurp gives it a little weight).

[Span]

jetboy_70 was right when he said this in your other thread. I've seen that many times.

Google only shows the meta description as a snippet if it can't find the search term in on page content. This can include image alt properties.

[Robert Charlton]

This is certainly not what i thought!
What does everyone else feel towards this apparent commonly accepted fact.

Skylo - Take a look at the following thread, starting at about message #49.

Make intelligent use of META tags - Part 1
[webmasterworld.com...]

The gist of it is that the engines favor information that's displayed and prominent over information that's not displayed and prominent, and the meta keywords and meta description are hidden. I've felt that the description tag might possibly have more weight than the keywords tag, because it's sometimes displayed, but neither is going to help you rank on Google.

[Tsuren]

Span, I am very sorry, but Jetboy was wrong. Google use it as a snippet if keyword exists in the first phrase of description. I have an example.

Do you want to bet? :)

[Span]

Do you want to bet?

Tsuren, no, lol.. you're right.
Actually, just did a search for the second phrase of a meta description from a page with 12 paragraphs of text and it ranked #1 with part of that meta tag as snippet..