How should I fix my short meta descriptions?

[schof]

I recently added meta descriptions to several community-supplied pages for our open source website

http://spree.tw/N53HuO

Google Webmaster Tools is complaining/warning that the meta descriptions are too short.  The descriptions are being supplied by our users and they typically do not lend themselves to anything much longer than what is being entered already.

I was thinking of adding some text to the end of the meta description.  Something like "This is one of many third party extensions for Spree supplied free of charge by our community" or something else like that.

Is it acceptable practice to reuse a snippet in your meta description like this?  Do you suggest other alternatives?  Since meta description doesn't affect page rank can I use terms that I'm trying to rank for on my home page without cannibalizing my link juice?

TIA,

Sean

[Sean_Dawes]

Hey Sean,

We have talked before as we work on one of the spree stores. You need to get content up on all these pages.

For example

http://spreecommerce.com/extensions/267-spree_product_zoom

If it is all user generated content, than you need to make some fields required to help automate this when people add new extensions. Such as title, description.

-Sean

[Audiohype]

Hi Sean,

Note that the meta description tags aren't going to be impacting your rankings. Google doesn't use this tag when determining a pages relevance.

What you do want to be considering is the impact it will have on the click through rate of your listings. By having short meta descriptions you are losing out in two areas:

• Less space is taken up on the page by your listing making it less obvious
• Less time to convince users that they should click on your advert.

Perhaps consider adding on a call to action on the meta description tags to counter both of these issues. Something link - "check out our huge range of third party extensions"?

Hope that helps,

Ben

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Sean, I had a look at a few and I think you could easily expand these descriptions so enourage your users to work towards a certain number of characters:

Create a multiple slideshow for Spree

becomes

Download page for the spree_multi_slideshow plugin which creates a multiple slideshow for Spree.

---

That's a bit rubbish but I don't know what Spree is but really, encourage your users to write a more accurate description. Don't use a generic chunk of text, that sucks and does not a strong description of the page make.

To be honest, you may have bigger problems as these pages are all pretty thin on content so getting them to rank at all, let alone display meta descriptions  may need a bit of work.

Hope this helps!
Marcus