When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
-
I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S
I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version.
**My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
-
I believe that this is going to be such a tiny tiny benefit that it might move you up from position 998 to 997, but if you are in the top 30 positions in the SERPs it will have zero impact.
It is also possible that the longer your description, the smaller the impact on any keyword.
I would invest my time in short, hot descriptions that elicit clicks.
-
Thanks Oleg.
Couldn't it help (even if a little) with ranking if the term that is in the meta description (the long one) wouldn't have been there otherwise?
-
Sure, it could match the search term and move around to display in serps but it won't help with ranking. The other downside is now instead of a complete message (which is the goal of a meta desc), you are letting G decide what parts to show and may not get your message across as you would like.
Ideal scenario is using the keywords within the max meta description length. No harm in going over, just not the best case scenario.
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
-
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Weird meta description for website launch
Hi all, We just launched a new website: http://www.allwatchapps.com/ There is no link yet, but everything seems allright in google webmaster tools: everypage seems to be indexed, and content keywords are good. However, when I search for "allwatchapps" in google, I got a meta description for the homepage: 26 mai 2014 - Contact. : + 33 (0)6.33.27.78.63 : info@allwatchapps.com : Grenoble - Lyon - Chambéry - Annecy - Paca - Paris ... It is the date of the page, which I want to disable (where does it com from?! I use Yoast SEO plugin and didn't find the option), and the footer contact info, why is that?... Thanks, best, Benoit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2MSens0 -
Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords. Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French. Background info: In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites. Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE). We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality. We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox. We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business. Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada. What are our options? Change domain and delete the current one? Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do. Keep donating to Adwords? Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks!2 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Website Siloing..best practice?
Hi all I am doing some research this week on the effects of siloing a Magento site. We have about 1,654 pages with approx 1,400 products. We want to silo the website in order to address the internal linking issues and to also focus the customer journey in a more organised way. I need to report all of the possible angles and effects that this will have on the site, prior to implementing it. Does anyone have info on best practice for siloing? I'd appreciate any help... Thanks Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Total_Displays0 -
How to auto generate a unique meta description?
The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in: <title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title> In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect. How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440 -
To subnav or NOT to subnav... that's my question.... :)
We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
>> 2 Round Packages
>> 3 Round Packages
>> 4 Round Packages
>> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
>> North End Courses
>> Central Courses
>> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful? Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?0