Will My Ranking Drop If....

[jpboxersox]

I change my description tag? When does Google usually change it?

Thanks

[sureshtechendeavour]

I also added new content to the page, ranking dropped.

[dadamson]

Any alteration to your site can hurt your rankings. Remember you can't be 100% why Google likes your site and why it chose to rank you where you rank.

Meta tags don't seem to carry too much weight these days so it is a pretty safe procedure to change the meta description.

You will need to wait a few days or weeks for Google to crawl and index your changes to their database however.

[zabalex]

Actually I have a different opinion than others.

If the new description is not as much effective in terms of keyword use then there may be some change in ranking. If the new description compliments the title, page content and your keywords, you can see some boost in ranking or no effect on SERP.

Once the googlebot will crawl and index the page that you have changed description of, the changes will be visible in google's SERP. The crawling and indexing varies depending upon the site. A reputable news website gets crawled and indexed daily or hourly, a reputable blog also get crawled and indexed hourly or daily. Google use to crawl some websites daily or after 2-3 days or weekly.

If you see the cached copy of your page you can find when last time google has crawled your site. It may crawl your website on weekend but not necsessarily the page that you have modified.

To inform google about the changes you should prepare the sitemap of your website including the tag <lastmod> which indicates when was last time you modified your page. Submit it to google webmaster tools. If you have already submitted a sitemap you can remove previous and add new. This way googlebot will come to know that you have made changes to your site.

[leapgoweb]

Google always loves content. so update content regularly for your website.

[seoextraordinar]

If you change it but keep the same KW's incorporated, then I don't see why your rankings would drop.

[nblake]

No, your ranking will not drop. Description is for user but Google emphasize more on title.

[StoneWilson]

It depends on how many contents you've changed and how you did that. About two months ago I planned to change my website's description, I wrote a totally different description(contain 4 sentences) from the former one (5 sentences), and I replaced the former description's sentence one by one in every 2 days, and nothing happenned to my ranking... If you want to change your site's title or description, just remember easy and slow.

[John Moore]

Changing a description tag ain't gunna send your site dropping in the ranks, so long as what got your site ranking in the first place is still present.....eg......links, content, age, etc.......then you'll be fine...