Hi Bek,

The short answer is that updating meta descriptions will have zero impact directly on how well these pages rank, however a more compelling meta description combined with a pretty URL and a decent title tag will help boost click-thru-rate (CTR).

CTR as a ranking factor is the latest Google Conspiracy theories amongst SEOs. Google denies they use SERP data however a lot of professional (including I believe Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz) disagree with this assertion based on their experiences...

So basically updating metas could have an indirect benefit for ranking, but mostly there will be zero impact and thus wouldn't be worth prioritizing over high-impact SEO activities.

If you had to update some, I'f urge that you evaluate which pages already rank on the first page and prioritize them for the best chance of a direct impact.

Or again if you have limited time, just focus on the title tags themselves. These will have the biggest impact!

More Info: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

I hope this sort of helps and puts you on the right path,

Nick

I think I also asked this within the comments section of the Moz Blog, but could you expand on some of the technical challenges of permitting "historical" DA?

Now that it has been updated/reset, surely now is the perfect time to start "when records began".

I'm assuming there's lots of us out that that have no record of old DA anywhere as we never really exported it but nevertheless would like to know or reminisce about the growth of our sites

Hi Jeff,

Robots.txt tester as per the above link is definitely worth playing with and is the easiest route to achieving what you want.

Another reactive way of managing this is in some cases is to simply see the range of parameters Google has naturally crawled within Search Console.

You can see this in the old search console for now. So login and go to Crawl --> URL Parameters.

If Googlebot has encountered any ?=params it will list them. You'll then have an option how to manage them or exclude them from the index.

It can be a decent way of cleaning up a site with lot's of indexed pages (1,000+), although please be sure to read this documentation before using it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

I suppose you're correct but it's all relative to the keyword in question, isn't it?

Glad someone else asked this question, thanks for clarification.