I did a lot of research on this topic for you Storwell. I read articles from Bing, Duanne Forrester, Q&As on Bing Webmaster's area and checked a few other sources as well. There are several non-credible sources that discuss the topic so be careful if you go searching online for the answer. There is even an article on Sphinn which is titled "Bing Says Goodbye to META Description as a Ranking Factor". The article simply has no credibility and serves as an example of what leads to so much confusion in the SEO world.

Bing does not definitively state meta descriptions are not a ranking factor. It would be my best guess that Bing either does use meta descriptions as a ranking factor or it is an extremely low weighted factor.

Indirectly, Bing does weigh CTR as a ranking factor and a meta description does influence CTR so it can have an effect that way. In this sense, I would suggest writing a meta description tag for users. Write the most compelling and accurate description you can which will entice readers to click-through to your site. I would not make any attempt to modify a meta description to improve rankings. Focus CTR.

Hi Sam,

I have a question about the tool's difficulty assessment. When watching the main video on your site, at about 4 minutes in there is a review of data using "dog training" as the seed keyword. The 8th result it the phrase "how to train your dog". If I am reading the graph correctly, the orange bar indicates difficulty. What seems strange is to obtain a 4-7 Google ranking shows as very easy, yet to obtain an 8-10 ranking shows as very hard for the same keyword.

I will make a guess that your process examines the DA/PA of the pages involved and assesses difficulty based on those metrics? I am not sure if that is the best method as a Wiki page, for example, is generally on the first page of SERPs for most queries. Also there are EMD names as well which may make it appear easy to beat from a DA/PA perspective, but otherwise it is a much higher level of difficulty to beat.

I like the tool and will likely try it out, but I had these questions previously and your reply here led me to going ahead and asking these questions. I hope you don't mind.

You can confirm directly from Google here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624

"While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results."

The meta description has absolutely no impact on rankings, at least not for Google. When your page's meta description is actually used for a search result, it may impact Click Through Rate but it definitely has no impact on ranking position.