How Important is Meta Description on Non-Entry Pages?
-
If a page is never used as an entry page to your website -- in other words it's an obscure, relatively unimportant page that never ranks high enough in the search engines to be in the first few pages of the search results for any significant number of searches -- does editing the META Description really have any significant benefit?
I guess the question could also be phrased as, does the Google Search Algo factor in the META Description tag, or is it only used for display purposes on the search results and doesn't affect ranking?
-
By non-entry page, I mean it's a page that may be indexed, now or in the future, but it essentially will always be buried in the rankings (unless you searched for the exact page title and first sentence words lol). In other words, it's not a page I'm trying to get ranked high so realistically its never going to be a page users enter my site through.
The consensus seems to confirm my initial gut on this. With limited time to spend on SEO, you have to prioritize. Meta description on a "non-entry" page should be very low priority since it's not a ranking factor and the meta description will be rarely seen if ever when the page is going to be on like page 7 of the SERPs for virtually all relevant searches.
The only case I can think of for doing this is if you are using Google for your own site search and you do want the page to be properly described in an internal site search result.
-
Hi,
does editing the META Description really have any significant benefit? - No, not in your case
does the Google Search Algo factor in the META Description tag, or is it only used for display purposes on the search results and doesn't affect ranking?
Meta description is not a direct ranking factor it is just for user to compels to click on search results but CTR does a ranking factor which is affected by meta description. If meta description is written in such a way that user compel to click on search result page , ctr will raise.
Hope it helps.
Thanks
-
No need to add meta description for the same pages because Google pick content for description from your page auto. So just remove meta description and meta keyword tag from that pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
Wrong meta descriptions showing in the SERPS
We recently launched a new site on https, and I'm seeing a few errors in the SERPS with our meta descriptions as our pages are starting to get indexed. We have the correct meta data in our code but it's being output in Google differently. Example: http://imgur.com/ybqxmqg Is this just a glitch on Google's side or is there an obvious issue anyone sees that I'm missing? Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Owens_10 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Pull meta descriptions from a website that isn't live anymore
Hi all, we moved a website over to Wordpress 2 months ago. It was using .cfm before, so all of the URLs have changed. We implemented 301 redirects for each page, but we weren't able to copy over any of the meta descriptions. We have an export file which has all of the old web pages. Is there a tool that would allow us to upload the old pages and extract the meta descriptions so that we can get them onto the new website? We use the Yoast SEO plugin which has a bulk meta descriptions editor, so I'm assuming that the easiest/most effective way would be to find a tool that generates some sort of .csv or excel file that we can just copy and paste? Any feedback/suggestions would be awesome, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | georgetsn0 -
Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?
Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results. Here is an example: Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page. And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users. Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this! Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks! Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Wrong page in serps
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niclaus78
I've been working with a law firm's website for a couple of years and we've encounter a problem. The pages were divided to target employers and employees separately. For the very targeted keywords mentioning either employees or employers everything was good but for broader less targeted keywords e.g unfair dismissal keywords chooses either one or the other which is a problem. Now I created this ''bridge'' pages where all the topics are explained and then users are directed to and then they will chose where to go. the problem is a lot of off page was created during this years either targeting on or the other. What I plan to do is: -Create a new site map and changing the priority, so the new pages will have a priority 1 and the others less. - bookmarks, articles, etc will be targeting now to the new pages. I place the new pages linked from the home page so that they get the link juice of the home page and they are also now more a category page in the map, so a level up comparing to the previous ones. Questions: 1- Is it worthwhile adding a rel canonical tag to the new pages and rel alternate to previous pages, or if its not a question of duplicate content it shouldn't have an impact? What other things should I take into consideration? Thanks a lot. nico0