SEOMoz Crawl Warnings, do they really hurt rankings?

[sanchez1960]

SEOMoz reports 250 crawl warnings on my site.  In most cases its too long title tags, with 4 of them its missing meta description.

SEOMoz says it will hurt my rankings? However, I'm sure a recent whiteboard Friday contradicted this.

So what is it?

[AlanMosley]

This may be the video, Matt Cutts said, the #1 mistake people make in SEO is crawlability
He states that crawability biggest step, then great content after thet marketing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6xxcQdAHbI

Bing also suggests crawlability is important.
Listening to Duane Forrester from Bing he often mentions trust in relation to SEO violations. The wrong use of redirects and canonical tags, errors and wrong dates in sitemaps, and other violations all lead to a loss of trust.
This is becoming even more important with microdata. A simple html error can give completely different meaning to the snippets. Up until now the bots had to find the content and work out if it is visible to the user, but now with microdata content is arranged in objects and being able to find and crawl these objects mean that you need to be free of violations

[RyanKent]

I humbly suggest the test you performed is flawed in some manner. Meta descriptions have no direct effect on Google rankings.

If you wish to stretch, you could say that a meta description might influence CTR and other metrics which do affect rankings. In that sense, almost anything can indirectly effect rankings.

[SlavaRybalka]

Meta descriptions do affect ranking. I tested.

[SlavaRybalka]

Matt Cutts himself mentioned in one of his videos that your website's accessibility to Google bot is one of the major things. You want 0 crawl errors and as many pages in Google index as possible.

[RyanKent]

Each warning is for a different metric. Depending on the metric it may affect rankings.

The long title tag warning is an issue which can affect rankings. The best understanding we have of title tags indicates the entire tag gets a fixed weight. If you use a single term such as "SEO" then all of the weight it applied to that single term. If you use a short phrase such as "Improve SEO Rankings" then the weight is divided amongst the three terms (although not evenly).

The title tag carries a lot of weight. If you provide long title tags you are likely losing some of the value and it definitely can affect rankings.

Additionally, the title tag affects Click Through Rate. If you offer a long title tag, it will get cut off by search engines and will likely reduce CTR.

Meta descriptions do not affect ranking (for Google) but they do impact CTR.

Bottom line, the warnings are designed to call your attention to items which should be investigated and/or fixed.