In yesterday’s article “”, I commented that the “description” meta tag is useless for positioning, and it created some surprise among some readers, since it has always been one of those points that all SEOs recommend filling with keywords, and so on. which.
Well, feeling very sorry for all those who thought that some agile modifications in the “description” would help them to climb positions, I retify what I already said: The description meta tag is NOT used to position
This is nothing new, but it seems to have gone quite under the radar. Already in 2009. Neither the “keywords” meta tag, nor the “description” meta tag. Google does not take it into account as a factor for its ranking. Matt Cutts’ words are exactly:
“Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show,
we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”
The why is very coherent. Simply because people abuse metatags (keywords and description), stuffing them with irrelevant keywords. In Matt’s words “Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag“.
In fact, Google has a kind of unwritten law that would be “if the user doesn’t see it, I don’t take it into account”. That is why the TITLE tag is so important, since there is no possibility of “cheating” there, since the TITLE always appears in the same place, with the same format, in the same location. Not like the case with any other content on the web, with which you can make works of art with CSS.
That’s not to say it’s not important. The description meta tag is very Important, since it appears on the Google results page, under the TITLE. That means your role comes into play when it has already been positioned, since at that moment the user must choose between 10 (or more) results of the . That is when we must “convince” the user to click on our result before the others. Hence, you must think carefully about what is written in that meta tag, since it is what the user will read.
So, when you write the next “description”, do not think about Google. Think about the user 😉
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