Does Google always use the Meta description ?

15 years ago

Most of time, yes. The spider will read the meta to define which field your website belongs to and then put you in the right classes.

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hipnol

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Harvey.Segal

Does Google always use the Meta description for DISPLAY in
it's search results (as opposed to using the content for
ranking)

Harvey

absolutely NOT. Google sometimes use meta description to display in search results and sometimes its own extract. Anyway, it caches both and the one displayed on the search results is dependent on the query you enter in google. In any case, it is for sure that the title is the same displayed for all queries.

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geolt7

15 years ago

Hi Harvey,

I believe you are talking about Google's use of meta description for ranking purposes. It may help a little bit but the bottom line is your content. The old school theory of SEO - Keyword density in the article or page still commands a higher priority as compared to meta data.

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1 reply

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Harvey Segal

15 years ago

Originally Posted by geolt7

I believe you are talking about Google's use of meta description for ranking purposes.

No - as I explained above it's for display purposes.

Originally Posted by hipnol

absolutely NOT. Google sometimes use meta description to display in search results and sometimes its own extract. Anyway, it caches both and the one displayed on the search results is dependent on the query you enter in google.

Ok, that sounds a likely explanation.

Harvey

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intelinside

15 years ago

Not Always but most of the time. Also, it somes take the 'snippet' from DMOZ directory as well.

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Superior

Banned 15 years ago

it doesn't use it always, it can take related lines from you content.

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AlexTampa

15 years ago

I would say less than 10%

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witty4u

15 years ago

we use meta for google search engine because google crawler easily understand what our site talking about because every thing we put in meta but in short form .

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JakeRhodes

15 years ago

When googling pages from my own sites I've noticed that they will often take a chunk of text from the page and use it as the description rather than the meta tags if it is more relevant to the search.

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xanol

15 years ago

Originally Posted by JakeRhodes

When googling pages from my own sites I've noticed that they will often take a chunk of text from the page and use it as the description rather than the meta tags if it is more relevant to the search.

What I've noticed too...

They will use your description if it's deemed relevant to the search, otherwise it seems to use content that's somewhat adjacent to the search keywords in the main body of the page.

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zoobie

15 years ago

The answer is no. If you have the META description written on your page then Google may use it to display and if you don't they will extract whatever content that match the user queries. But there are times that Google will display more that META description but you should always add them on all your pages that wish to rank..

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KPKP

15 years ago

I've seen it used sometimes and sometimes not. It's important to make it dynamic though since Google will likely use it to help with search rankings.

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freedomguy

15 years ago

It depends on how good a summary of the page your meta description is. If it's tightly focussed on your main keyphrase theme it is more likely to be used. I find the better I get at crafting meta desciptions the more likely they are to be used by Google in the SERPS. The big plus about a really good meta description is that it becomes the body of your ad on the SERPS page, your title tag of course being the headline. For those who use Adwords, write your page title tag and meta description as though you were writing your Adwords Ad, just with more characters available to do a better job, an added bonus is your page becomes a much better landing page as a result.

In short, if you do a better job at crafting your description than Google's 'spider scribes', then it will most likely get used. It works for me!

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BurgerBoy

15 years ago

I've been doing IM for ten years now and Google has always used the meta tag description that I have on my pages in the html instead of pulling content from the page to display.

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Kevin Lam

15 years ago

Originally Posted by BurgerBoy

I've been doing IM for ten years now and Google has always used the meta tag description that I have on my pages in the html instead of pulling content from the page to display.

I'll have to call BS on this one.

Matt Cutts on meta description:

YouTube - Is Google doing away with use of the...

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homebasedmom

15 years ago

By adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site, command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command.

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maestro2010

15 years ago

G uses meta but according to latest interview with Matt Cutt, it was found that meta keywords or other stuff is not helping in getting a site ranked.

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PONTING

15 years ago

Most of the time your total meta description is included in google. But, sometimes a little part from it is shown. So, you should be wise when writing the meta description. The starting of the Meta Description must be attractive and innovative so that google can show it when users search with your keywords.

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Does Google always use the Meta description ?

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