Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

“Why does google ignore my meta description?”

I’ve seen this question asked in forums, on blogs, and in search referral strings. There are several reasons why a search engine may ignore a meta description, although the search engines might change their algorithms at any time.

The meta description element is presently only used by the major search engines to assist in managing the listings they provide in their search results. That is, they don’t index your meta descriptions for resolving queries. Hence, if you’re embedding keywords in the meta description element but not elsewhere on your page (or in link anchor text), the search engines are essentially blinding themselves to the keywords you want to rank for.

The meta keywords and meta description elements have, unfortunately, been abused by search spammers through the years. To reduce the effect of that abuse, search engines just look at the meta description for help in determining what they can show searchers whenever your page is included in search results.

For that reason, the SEO industry has been advising people for several years to create unique, concise, relevant meta descriptions for each of the pages on their sites for several years.

But even if you create the meta descriptions correctly, some search engines may instead prefer to use descriptions provided by Yahoo!’s directory or the DMOZ directory when they show your page listings. To prevent that from happening, you need to include “noydir,noodp” in a robots meta element for each page. There is presently no way to implement this directive on a site-wide or page-independent basis.

But what if you have excluded the directory descriptions and you have written unique, concise, relevant meta descriptions for each page and they still don’t appear?

The search engines are trying to match the queries users type in with the information they provide in search listings. If you don’t use the exact query expression in your meta description but it does appear elsewhere in the page (in indexable content), there is a good chance the search engine will create a descriptive text snippet for its listing from the content on your page rather than from your meta description.

Which is not to say that the meta description is a waste of effort — you can target the meta description element, using it to focus on your primary keyword. You can embed other text snippets on your page that address other queries that are similar.

I would not do this for many expressions, and I would be careful not to use keyword injection (simply replacing query expressions and then replicating the same text block several times). Try to keep each page focused on 2-4 expressions.

The fact that you CAN optimize a page for 100 expressions doesn’t mean you always should. That takes more skill and practice than most people can devote to the task.

Another reason why your meta description element may not be working is you could have broken code — a mistyped element — in your page header. It happens. If the search engines cannot parse your content correctly, they’ll ignore huge swathes of text and code until they find something that looks like it makes sense to them.