Comments on: Google Decrees: Meta Keyword and Description Don’t Factor Into Rankings

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:36:41 +0000

Actually, I stand corrected, I just saw their comment about the meta description in the blog post…my bad!

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:35:14 +0000

Google’s blog post was only about the meta “keyword” tag, not about the meta description tag, so I think your statement is somewhat inaccurate.

However, there are been many SEO companies using their own data who have written about the meta description tag and how it does not correlate strongly with rankings (SEOmoz is one such company). Nevertheless, even if the meta description is not a ranking factor as a previous poster said you cannot ignore it because it has a great impact on click-throughs from SERPs.

By: Merchant Account Pro

Merchant Account Pro — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:39:20 +0000

Google may not use the meta description in ranking, but you want a great description that gets people to click on your listing. Once you get ranked, the description and title tag is your ad copy and it needs to be good so the users will click on it. That is the whole purpose behind getting rank, to get traffic and you do that by getting clicks!

By: Online Marketing Minneapolis

Online Marketing Minneapolis — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:24:27 +0000

Just this week at SMX East 2009 Yahoo claimed that they ignore meta keywords as well. Jill Whalen is claiming that her tests prove that they still index keywords. So, who knows. There is a long history of the search engine companies making misleading statements.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:09:16 +0000

Google may be keeping the selectivity based on META tags on the back burner for all we know. Just when people catch on to an optimization methodology that seems to be working, BAM, google throws the switch and makes meta tag descriptions a deciding factor.

Just a wild guess. They’ll trick us again one day.

I found that META descriptions don’t have much weight, though at least for my site. I made the mistake one time of copying and modding a template a I made for my wife’s site, but accidentally left the old meta keywords and description in there for MY site from which it came. Didn’t affect her site though in terms of rankings, and the keywords I optimized it for were still popping her site up in the first 10 pages (semi broad terms).

By: Minneapolis Marketing - Scott DeToffol

Minneapolis Marketing - Scott DeToffol — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:44:16 +0000

This was something we “knew” already, but it sure is nice to have official confirmation. Google needs to be more forthright and specific about these things.

I agree we need to include keywords for the other engines until we hear otherwise, but they need less focus and energy spent on them.

This announcement will actually help SEM pros with meta descriptions because we can point our clients to this clarification and write them for users on the SERP and not worry about unnatural keyword stuffing.