Meta Description Dead?

[crankydave]

The flurry of activity by the Googlebots has spurred a subsequent flurry of threads and speculation surrounding them and their activity. I've been watching my SERP's bouncing around like a ping-pong ball almost hourly. I noticed that my meta description was being replaced by page text in the search display for a few of my pages. I just checked again and noticed even more of my pages are having the meta description being replaced by page text. What I found interesting was that in several instances the page text being displayed was not necessarily located near my search term. The text was taken from the top of the page. Is the meta description going the way of the dinosaur? Is Google sending it to join meta keywords?

Dave

[TelecomHunter]

I have two sites, and I noticed that one site has no description text. It has been replaced with the page text like you said, and the other site still uses the meta desription.

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[greeneagle]

I thought the "description" metatag was dead already and that the "Title" tag and "Content" were King already! Maybe it is time to resurrect the "Content is King" issue.

Ken

[sfowler]

Google may not use it, but others do, so I would keep it.

[greeneagle]

You are absolutely right Simon. The other SEs and many Directories use the "keyword" and "description" metatags!

Not only that, it is a good practice to establish a hierarchal logical order for every site and a keyphrase pyramid is a good starting point.

Ken

[crankydave]

greeneagle wrote:

I thought the "description" metatag was dead already and that the "Title" tag and "Content" were King already! Maybe it is time to resurrect the "Content is King" issue.

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps not only is "Content King" but it may be getting "crowned" if Google has decided to ignore it and only displays page text from the top of the page and not necessarily near the search term. Might this add better relevancy to the search results and provide the actual page text for the searcher to browse? Wouldn't this help to eliminate "misleading" titles and descriptions?

Dave

[smo]

The logic is Meta descriptions can easily be manipulated by webmasters, as they are not visible to general visitors. Another point is you can't have any fixed keywords for a dynamic page. Say forums like this can't get the fixed keywords for the pages. So the content is the most relevant thing for the search engines.