WebProNews

Tag: meta tags

  • Matt Cutts Discusses Duplicate Meta Descriptions

    Google has released a new Webmaster Help video featuring Matt Cutts talking about duplicate and unique meta descriptions.

    Cutts answers this submitted question:

    Is it necessary for each single page within my website to have a unique metatag description?

    “The way I would think of it is, you can either have a unique metatag description, or you can choose to have no metatag description, but I wouldn’t have duplicate metatag description[s],” Cutts says. “In fact, if you register and verify your site in our free Google Webmaster Tools console, we will tell you if we see duplicate metatag descriptions, so that is something that I would avoid.”

    “In general, it’s probably not worth your time to come up with a unique meta description for every single page on your site,” he adds. “Like when I blog, I don’t bother to do that. Don’t tell anybody. Ooh. I told everybody. But if there are some pages that really matter, like your homepage or pages that have really important return on investment – you know, your most featured products or something like that – or maybe you’ve looked at the search results and there’s a few pages on your site that just have really bad automatically generated snippets. We try to do our best, but we wouldn’t claim that we have perfect snippets all the time.”

    No, believe it or not Google is not perfect (as Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt also reminded us).

    Cutts concludes, “You know, in those kinds of situations, then it might make sense to go in, and make sure you have a unique handcrafted, lovingly-made metatag description, but in general, rather than have one metatag description repeated over and over and over again for every page on your site, I would either go ahead and make sure that there is a unique one for the pages that really matter or just leave it off, and Google will generate the snippet for you. But I wouldn’t have the duplicate ones if you can help it.”

    Some will probably take Matt’s advice, and start spending a lot less time bothering with meta descriptions. Just remember that part about looking at the search results and making sure that Google isn’t displaying something too weird, particularly if it’s an important page.

  • Google: Actually, Meta Tags Do Matter.

    Google posted a new Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts today. The question at hand this time is: How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter?

    This one is also significant because Cutts submitted the question himself. That means, he felt this was an important enough issue, that even though it wasn’t submitted it by a user, needed to be addressed.

    “So the conventional wisdom a few years ago was that meta tags mattered a whole lot,” says Cutts. “You really had to tweak them and spent a lot of time to get your keywords right, and did you have a space, or a comma between your keywords, and all that kind of stuff. And we’ve mostly evolved past that, but the pendulum might have gone a little bit too far in the other direction, because a lot of people sometimes say, don’t think at all about meta tags. Don’t spend any time whatsoever on them, and so let me give you a more nuanced view.”

    “You shouldn’t spend any time on the meta keywords tag,” he says. “We don’t use it. I’m not aware of any major search engine that uses it these days. It’s a place that people don’t really see when they load the browser, and so a lot of webmasters just keyword stuff there, and so it’s really not all that helpful. So we don’t use meta keywords at all.”

    This is actually not the first time Cutts has posted a video about this topic. There was one from several years ago, where he basically said the same thing about the keywords meta tag. At the time, Google talked about how it used the description meta tag, as well as the meta tags “google,” “robots,” “verify-1,” “content type,” and “refresh”.

    Here’s a chart from Google Webmaster Tools, which breaks down how Google understands different meta tags:

    Google meta tags

    “But we do use the meta description tag,” Cutts continues in the new video. “The meta description is really handy, because if we don’t know what would make a good snippet, and you have something in the meta description tag that would basically give a pretty good answer–maybe it matches what the user typed in or something along those lines, then we do reserve the right to show that meta description tag as the snippet. So we can either show the snippet that might be the keyword in context on the page or the meta description.”

    “Now, if the meta description is really well written and really compelling, then a person who sees it might click through more often,” he says. “So if you’re a good SEO, someone who is paying attention to conversion and not just rankings on trophy phrases, then you might want to pay some attention to testing different meta descriptions that might result in more clickthrough and possibly more conversions. So don’t do anything deceptive, like you say you’re about apples when you’re really about red widgets that are completely unrelated to apples. But if you have a good and a compelling meta description, that can be handy.”

    “There are a lot of other meta tags,” he says. “I think in the metadata for this video, we can link to a really good page of documentation that we had, that sort of talks about which stuff we pay attention to and which stuff we don’t pay attention to. But at a 50,000-foot level, don’t pay attention to the keywords meta tag. But the description meta tag is worth paying attention to.”

    It sounds like SEO still matters.