The long maligned HTML meta tag is having a bit of a revival as of late. SEO guru Danny Sullivan wrote the obituary on the ill-fated meta keywords and meta description tag several years ago. But does Google use meta tag data? Does the meta description tag live on while the meta keywords tag is extinct? Out at Kirkland’s Webmaster Central, Google’s Vanessa Fox has broken the impasse by coming out in favor of using the meta description tag.
In a User Forum, Vanessa responded to a perceived indexing issue as follows:
Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page — in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.
Summary: By adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page’s content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site: command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command. Thanks to Barry Schwartz for help on this report.
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