Meta Descriptions Are Not Necessary For SEO. But They Are Important.
John Mueller of Google answered a question on Reddit about whether meta descriptions make sense. His answer may be somewhat surprising to SEOs who are interested in writing a good meta description and are frustrated when Google overwrites them.
SEO Says Meta Descriptions Don’t Make Sense
An SEO on Reddit asked if meta descriptions have become empty and meaningless based on something posted by another SEO on social media. The sense that they were useless was based on the idea that Google was rewriting them, removing any motivation or point to create them in the first place.
Writing Meta Descriptions Is Not Required
A Redditor asked:
“Meta descriptions are meaningless and useless?”
One Redditor responded:
“It’s true. Not because he says it, but it’s been true for 20+ years.”
John Mueller of Google responded:
Yes, but then again, there’s no penalty for writing your own, and sometimes it helps you get the point across the page.” Overall, I think it’s still appropriate to do so on individual pages you care about, but it’s by no means a requirement.”
Mueller’s response had three nuances worth examining.
The obvious takeaway is that meta descriptions are not required and, secondly, that there is no penalty for not writing them. His answer is in line with Google’s guidelines, which strictly states that meta descriptions are not required.
Google’s official documentation explains:
“If you don’t have time to create a description for each page, try to prioritize your content; at the very least, create a description for important URLs like your home page and popular pages.”
Meta descriptions are meaningless
Therefore, although it is not necessary to create them on every page of the website, Google still recommends that you write them for the most important pages. There are many long-standing reasons why it is important to write meta descriptions for important pages.
One of the obvious ones is product pages. Oftentimes information on product pages is spread across a web page, with data about price, reviews, product manufacturer, and model listed on different parts of the page, making it difficult for Google to create a snapshot of that.
Google’s guidelines for meta descriptions explain another reason why they are pointless:
“A meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include information about the page. For example, news or blog posts can list author, publication date, or byline information.
This can provide potential visitors with highly relevant information that may not be featured in the caption otherwise. Similarly, product pages may have key pieces of information—price, age, manufacturer—spread across the page. A good meta description can bring all this data together.”
Therefore, if the site owner takes off his SEO hat and puts on his Product Manager hat, then you will see that it can be important to control the content of the meta description in order to have a consistent and attractive meta description that talks about how the company would like to be perceived.
SEOs usually call Google’s default snippets ransom notes for a reason. It’s not always the consistent message the site owner would like to present. Therefore, if it matters how the company is perceived by consumers or the audience, then it makes a lot of sense to at least create the most important meta descriptions.
Get Page Focus
The third takeaway is probably the most interesting. Mueller said the act of writing a meta description is a useful exercise because it forces the site owner (or SEO) to think about what each web page is about. The act of writing a meta description can help determine whether a web page is about the topics the authors really intended.
Even if Google ignores the meta description, summarizing the page in one or two short sentences requires the publisher to say what the page is really about. That kind of clarity about the content is important in terms of understanding whether the page is optimized for the target audience and topics.
Google Recommends Prioritizing Important Pages
Mueller’s response is consistent with Google’s own guidance, which recommends prioritizing the content itself rather than arguing about meta descriptions. Google guidelines recommend focusing on writing meta descriptions for important pages if creating meta descriptions is a burden, especially if there are thousands of pages.
That means site owners don’t need to write unique descriptions for each page; homepage, important landing pages, and high traffic content is where the effort can be most useful in terms of controlling what is displayed in Google search results so that part of the website’s personality or brand logo stands out.
Meta descriptions are optional, but also not useless. If all you’re looking at is serving the level’s purpose, then yes, the meta description makes no sense. But if you take off the SEO hat and put on the marketing and branding hat, then the meta description becomes important, undoubtedly more so these days when branding is becoming the new backlink.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI
