Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about whether meta descriptions are pointless. His answer may be somewhat surprising to SEOs who are interested in how to write a good meta description and who are frustrated when Google overwrites them.
An SEO Says Meta Descriptions Are Pointless
An SEO on Reddit asked whether meta descriptions have become useless and pointless based on something another SEO posted on social media. The sentiment that they are useless was grounded in the idea that Google rewrites them, removing any incentive or point to create them in the first place.
Writing Meta Descriptions Is Not A Requirement
The Redditor asked:
“Meta descriptions pointless and useless?”
Another Redditor answered:
“It’s true. Not because he said it, but it’s been true for 20+ years.”
Google’s John Mueller answered:
“Yes, but also, there’s no penalty to writing your own, and sometimes it helps you to figure out a clear focus for a page. Overall, I think it’s still worthwhile to do so for individual pages that you care about, but it’s definitely not a requirement.”
Mueller’s response had three nuances that are worth exploring.
The obvious takeaway is that meta descriptions are not required and, secondly, that there is no penalty for not writing them. His response aligns with Google’s own guidelines, which strongly imply that meta descriptions are not necessary.
Google’s official documentation explains:
“If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.”
Meta Descriptions Are Not Pointless
So, while it’s not necessary to create them for every page of a website, Google still recommends writing them for the most important pages. There are many longstanding reasons why it’s important to write meta descriptions for important pages.
One of the obvious ones is product pages. Many times the information for product pages is scattered throughout a web page, with data about the price, reviews, the product manufacturer, and model listed in different parts of the page, which makes it hard for Google to create a snippet for that.
Google’s own guidelines for meta descriptions explain another reason why they are not pointless:
“The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include information about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information.
This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together.”
So, if a site owner takes off their SEO hat and puts on their Brand Manager hat, then they will see that it can be…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
