Alright, Quentin (person who asked the question). Let me lay a little bit of schooling on you. It actually turns out that we used to not use the meta description at all. We would only use the snippet appropriate to the specific search query.
And only in recent years have we added it where if you have a meta description, we will sometimes choose that meta description over a little snippet from within the page. In fact, it is moving in the other direction. We started out as only having stuff from within the page, and now we are a little more likely to sometimes use the meta description.
But, we don’t use it all the time. If we think it’s useful for the query, don’t make the same meta description on every single page, just as a cookie cutter; because then we sort of think ‘That’s not a very useful meta description’.
It’s not that we are doing away meta description, we use it more now than we did, say 7-8 years ago. At the same, we think it has to be useful before we’ll use meta description. So the best thing you could do is to make a really useful meta description and then you’re more likely to see that instead of a snippet from a page.
If you don’t want to bother, that’s completely fine, too. We’ll just try to do whatever we think it’s the smartest and the best for users.
Hopefully, users will click through and find your content.
Related posts:
- In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?
- Are titles and description tags helpful to increase the organic CTR – clicks generated from organic (unpaid) search – which in turn will help in better ranking with a personalized search perspective?
- How do meta geo tags influence the search results?
- Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?
- Does Google Analytics have plans to start adding specific tools around Web 2.0 or social media websites?
