Meta Description Question
-
Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company? so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like
Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com. We have Widget in 30 colors. Free shipping for orders over $50.
and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok. I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description. After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL
-
Hi John,
Let me repeat, know of no evidence of Google penalizing a site because of keyword use in the meta description tag. So including it or removing it here will most likely have little impact on your rankings, although it may impact your CTR. Having the your site name in both your title and meta description should be fine, at least from a ranking perspective.
Here's a hypothetical situation where you can get into trouble:
70% of your inbound anchor text is all the same keyword
The keyword is the first word of your title tag, and appears 2-3x
The keyword is stuffed in your body text.Yes, it's hard NOT to have your keyword as anchor text when you have an exact match domain, but there seems to be at least some evidence of Google hitting sites that have overly optimized exact match anchor text, even for branded domains. The jury is still out, but diversifying your inbound anchor text seems like a smart strategy.
-
Thanks Cyrus I am not sure what you mean by
"The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about."
You mean not to abuse Anchor Text ? When you domain and company name are both an EDM (a great thing to have in the past) it is hard not to use it in Anchor. I guess what you are saying is dont use mysite.com as anchor instead use My Site or Here?
Oh right now I have mysite.com in the title and in many of the meta descriptions so it sounds like I should remove it from one or the other.
-
As Ben said, as far as we know Google doesn't use the meta description in it's ranking algorythm in any significant way. And I haven't seen any evidence changing in light of Penguin. So if it's natural for you to include it in your meta description, I'd encourage you to do so.
That said, if your domain is an exact match and it's a keyword you use a lot, I would encourage you to be careful in other areas of over-optimization (title tag, inbound links, keyword stuffing, etc.)
The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about.
Additionally, here's a couple of my favorite articles on Penguin:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
-
Very good points. I would like the company name (same as domain name) to go either in the title of the description but I like your idea to put it in the Description and re-think the title for a call to action.
In some cases Google is using info from my footer instead of the Meta Description in the SERPs?
-
Google doesn't really look at the meta description anymore so I wouldn't stress about it.
Although personally I'd not include the domain name in the meta description as you're probably mentioning the brand name in the title tag and it's going to appear directly above the description in tiny green writing anyway. So why not fill your title tag with things designed to encourage a high click through? Things like "Free shipping on orders over $50. Widgets available in 30 colours including popular colour 1, popular colour 2 and popular colur 3."
-
I am beginning to realize that being an SEO is like being a Doctor or a Lawyer. You get to practice your entire career and people actually tolerate that behavior.
-
Oh and thanks for letting me know that I am not alone staring at the dark object on the floor and wonder were it took so much traffic. Until April 24th I had no idea shadows were black and white and liked the cold.
-
I guess I should also mention that the name of this company is also an Exact Domain Match (EDM) of a great key word within this industry.
So I am now afraid that if I don't take out all my references to the actually company name out of the Description I will get penalized for stuffing.
Putting the name of the company is very typical for e-commerce company.
-
I don't foresee this being a problem.
At all.
And I know what you mean about being scared of your own shadow
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
-
Product Descriptions (SEO)
Hello, I sell products relating to wood. Although the products vary, I like to give description of the wood type for the customers who might not be familiar with it. Will it hurt my rankings to give the same descriptions for the same wood type as long as the majority of the description is different? Here is an example of the layout: 1. Different description for different products 2. The same short description for the same wood types (seen throughout multiple pages) Hopefully my question makes sense.
On-Page Optimization | | mattl992 -
Simple question: I wonder if I'm over internally linking?
Hi, What's you guys' policy on how much to internally link. I do it a lot - whenever it makes sense, but hold off if I just linked to the same page in the last paragraph, for instance. Would like to know your thoughts to see if I'm overdoing it. This is for Ecommerce blog posts, category descriptions, and product descriptions if that matters. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Generating a meta-description
What are some things I should know before implementing a process whereby (public) user account data is used to generate a meta-description? I can't find much information in the existing forums. Are rich snippets a better option in 2015?
On-Page Optimization | | CallumClothierfairs0 -
Question Re Cornerestone Page And Anchor Text For Internal/External Links
Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars". I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page. Should the anchor text for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO? Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various? Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing? If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance. I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Meta description template - will i penalised? Similar but not the same.
UPDATE to original question: Ok can I also add, as a solution, could I use %%title%% | A Commercial Property Website that deals exclusively with Industrial Property, Land and Investments For Sale or Let across Scotland. In Yoast as a meta description - so the descriptions will have individual titles but the rest the same? Or will I be penalised? This is for the 1000 or so listings, but I'll write completely unique descriptions for the pages? We have taken on the marketing and SEO of a site that we didn't build. After the first crawl report there were 103 errors, 760 warnings and 990 notices. Including a lot of 301s - which I'm confused as is a brand new site. http://www.shedfinders.com/ I've made some changes in the editor to ensure unique page titles so errors should come down. However i wanted to ask advice how best to optimise a site like this ... people come on they list an industrial property and then those in the market to let or sell can browse and then get more details on industrial property they like the look of. So there are lots of listings going on that aren't correctly optimised ... should these manually all have meta descriptions and rewrite headers etc? Ideally the listings would rank themselves in Google - but I'm going to no index some of the other less relevant pages. Keen to hear your feedback. Thanks, Laura
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
Quick question about bold italics keywords in today's SEO world
Hello guyz do you think that , **or **tags still help you in ranking better for some keyword or this method has become obsolete?****
On-Page Optimization | | ksbnok0 -
Page title in SERP question
Has anyone typed in a phrase in Google and seen their listing on the SERP, but the page title on the Google SERP is not what the CMS is set to ? Ie the page title in the SERP is not what is expected? Something related to the company, but not what is set on the CMS… Very odd – has anyone seen something like this before? What could be causing it? Is there a way to change it?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0