This is an article originally posted in September of 2006. We’ve updated it some and posted it for your review.
What was once a useful component to help increase rank has been reduced to a blurb from the past. Some SEOs claimed to have excluded meta description tags since 2002 with no harmful results. From what I’ve seen, there was use for meta descriptions up until early 2004. The question many are asking now, and a valid question at that, is if exclude them will ranks be negatively affected?
Currently, one can safely say there is zero negative affects on your SERP position from leaving meta tags out of your pages. There are more important items you can spend your time on that will leave a far greater impact on your rank. These items would obviously include content creation, titles, and link creation.
Just like meta keywords, the major search engines do not use the description tag as a component in their ranking system (maybe MSN does but if they do it’s only to a very small degree.) However, once again, ALL search engines view and usually cache your tags, and once again you can face delays/penalties if you create spammy description tags. Anything over 250 characters is too long, any description tag with more tehan 5 keyword phrases is getting into the spammy region.
Having said all this, there are still uses for the meta description tag that you should be aware of. Pick a search term for your site, open all three SE’s (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and find your site. What do you see in the results? The major engines STILL USE your meta description in the search results (if they feel it’s relevant of course.) They provide a quick snippet for your would be visitors. Interesting snippets can translate into greater CTR (click-through-rate).
(Remember, you can tell Google to use your on page description tag over the ODP (Open Directory Project) tag (if you’ve managed to get inclusion.) This means if you do not use the “no odp” meta tag Google will actually make a decision between your description tag and the ODP tag judging which provides a better synopsis of your web site. Why does this matter? It’s a clear indication that Google includes provisions for description tags–meta description tags still have important uses especially with Google.)
Here’s a dilemma, your site has 15,000 products that all require unique meta description tags. You can do three things:
1) leave them out completely, write good quality content and kill two birds with one stone: great content that will help your rankings, and content that will help bring people to your site (the synopsis displayed in the results pages.)
2) Take the time to write them out for 15,00 pages, greater control over what is said for each product.
3) Write a quick program to automatically generate meta description tags knowing you may have problems with repetition.
All in all, we’d choose 1 if we had those three options. Smaller web sites under 50 pages may wish to opt for number 2. Like we’ve seen, in search descriptions it is the description meta tag that offers a brief synopsis of your web site. As a result, consider this when writing your tags: meta description tags are NOT major components of SEO, but ARE very important for bringing users to your site, you should be writing your tags accordingly–for the user not the bot.
[tags]meta, meta description, meta tags[/tags]