Description tags picked by Google instead of you writing them increase ranking!?...

We have all been told to write great description tags for our posts, and many WP users use all in seo or other plugins to let Google know exactly what the description tag is. So, I do write them for all my posts as well. And I know one of the reasons is so that you can write attention grabbing stuff that will increase your click-through rate.

But recently, after reading about it on a thread by (I believe) Mike Anthony, I have been paying attention to how the description tag is used by Google, and in many cases, it doesn't even display what I had put in originally as description tag, it just uses a "random" text from the body of the post. Of course, this is based on the keyword being used by the searcher.


So, I am left to wonder, if it is actually better to let Google figure this out and choose the most appropriate description tag based on the keywords being used to search rather than giving it a template to use?... I mean, it would seem that letting Google do it (all the time - since it already does it with many keywords) would probably have a better effect in ranking as well.

I am also trying to test it, though its kind of hard. I documented current rankings across multiple keywords for a few old posts. Then I removed description tags from those posts to see what happens. I just started this yesterday, so I would think it would take a few days or perhaps more to see any results.


Of course, you can never be sure what caused the change when it comes to SEO. But I am not doing anything else to these posts to reduce the possibility of something else casing any change. Lets see what happens.


What do you guys think about this? Has anyone had any specific experience with this (perhaps tested it)?...