What is better for Meta description ??
-
Hi everybody,
I noticed that a lot of websites prefer their meta description would be the first words of the content inside.
I on the other hand thought that google will prefer the meta description to be like a peek to what going to be inside.
anyone can explain me, what is better?Thanks
-
Dynamic templates can be a great solution, so long as you're incorporating a variety of dynamic elements, not just swapping out one or two words.
I have seen some debate on whether or not to set a meta description, and I think it's really a CRO choice. Google is always going to match a search query with a relevant excerpt from the page when a meta description is not available, so if you trust Google's judgment, it can be fine to go without. I don't think that philosophy is hurting Yelp at all.
-
Thanks all for your insights on this - it's very helpful.
If you have a unique page I am sure, writing unique content is best. But in the example of Yelp, where they have 100,000+ of pages, the meta description in the code is the first lines from the first post on the page.
Would they be better off creating a general template for each page type ?
For example for restaurant pages (JUST AN EXAMPLE
"<# of posts> posts about <restaurant name="">, what did people like? what did people hate? - read on Yelp"</restaurant>
Thanks again for your help!
-
Writing your own unique, compelling meta description is best. Often, large sites resort to using first words of content as the meta description because they cannot scale writing and implementing 100,000+ meta descriptions.
-
Rebecca - CTR does not effect rankings, not what I said. However I believe that google does monitor the users on page experience and check whether they task complete. If they task complete and spend time on the site, we have seen rankings influenced by that. So a combination of CTR and time on site/task complete.
-
Google doesn't really have a preference since it's not a ranking factor. In fact, Google will often ignore your meta description entirely in favor of displaying a content snippet that it considers to be more relevant to the searcher's query.
However, you can increase your click-through rate by making it relevant to the query you're targeting. Make it descriptive and consider including a call to action to entice a searcher to click on your link. However, I disagree with another poster that click-through rate can affect rankings. It would be too easy to game the system, and search engines caught on to that trick a long, long time ago.
Basically, write unique, relevant meta descriptions for readers, not for search bots; and understand that Google will always treat your meta description as nothing more than a polite suggestion.
-
The meta description allows you an opportunity to construct your search result or Ad - for clickability.
Alick and Chris are spot on. You should consider creating a 156-160 characters meta description and ensure comprised with a call of action, so when customers read the meta description, they will be enticed to click on your link and visit your website. Meta descriptions are very important given their impact to directly drive traffic to your site.
Google has stated the meta description is not a direct ranking factor. Indirectly however it is. If more people click through to your website and those people ALSO engage with your website - our experience is your ranking can increase. If you increase your CTR on one page by changing the meta description it can translate into 1,000's of additional clicks per year.
Hope this assists.
-
Hi there,
You're right, a meta description should almost be like the blurb on a book giving the user a good idea of whats going on inside the page. The reason you might find that some meta descriptions are picking up the first words of content is because if a website does not have a meta description set, Google will pull what it thinks to be a good meta description from the content: normally he first sentence or two. They key is to get a good mix of good content, improve CTR & mix a keywordsor two in into a small area.
If you want some tips on writing a good meta descriptions there are some great resources here on Moz like the beginners guide to or Alick300s suggestions.You can also look through Q&A etc.
Hope that helps.
-
Hi,
Check this article @ https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/meta-description
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres0 -
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
Translated version of meta description showing in SERPs
Hi all, When a search for our brand is done, the homepage is shown but the meta description is in French. We have a translated version of the site available once the user is on the site, but there's no reason it should be displaying the translated version in the SERPs. This issue has never happened before and began last week. Anyone seen anything similar? https://www.google.com/search?q=revolve+clothing Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Which is better: put product videos on Youtube, or video host like Wistia or Vimeo ???
I have a couple of new product videos for my ecommerce site. I am wondering if it benefits my marketing more to put the videos on Youtube, or on some video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo? The benefits of putting them on Youtube seem to be ease of embedding, the ability to get a link back from the Youtube page, and having them appear in Youtube searches. (I hear that Youtube is now one of the most used search engines) I'm really not sure what the benefits of using a hosting service are. But I do remember reading articles saying it was better than using Youtube for some reason.... Help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Should I use selected Keywords in Meta Title of non important pages
Hi All, I have identified 2 main keywords that I want a website to be found for 1: Alarm Systems 2: Security Systems I have two relevant landing pages set up and optimised for these terms and I have also optimised the home page for these terms I have countless other pages on the website that I don't really need to optimise such as Distributor Benefits or Supplier Benefits, About Us etc My question is should I use my selected keywords (alarm systems, security systems) in the Meta Title on these non important pages or should I just use them on the selected landing pages and home page? Historically I have used my primary keywords on all non important pages but not sure if Google looks down on this now. Thanks Robbie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
What is better for google: keep old not visited content deeply in the website, or to remove it?
We have quite a lot of old content which is not visited anymore. Should we remove it and have a lot of 410 errors which will be reported in GWT? Or should we keep it and forget about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
Hello all, think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything. You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models. How would you make both of them live together in your website? If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions). In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome1