Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?

[Viewpoints]

I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great).

They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks!

The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.

[Saijo.George]

If you are sending Facebook and Twitter Trafic to these pages try and use Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards

[SEO5Team]

Hi Brittany,

While it is not essential to have meta descriptions for each page, especially if they are not indexed by Google, there can still be some benefit to having meta descriptions for pages people are linking to. Users can see the meta description if the page shows up during a search query, and sites with strong meta descriptions tend to come across as more professional. There is always a chance the page can show up in other search engines and directories, so you won’t want to worry about random text showing up. There is no real ranking benefit to meta descriptions, but Google does indicate whether meta descriptions are too long, too short, or too similar in Webmaster Tools, so it would seem Google would consider proper meta descriptions to be of at least some value.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Brittany,

You need to come up with a strategy and stick with it. You didn't say what type of page your "No Index" page is. But you may have a very good reason why you classify it a no index page. It just seems counter productive to no index that page or a group of pages, but yet encourage social media to link to it.

Heck no one wants to go back later and optimize a page that should have been optimized to begin with. Normally we use a template when building a web page so that all of items we want to index for are conveniently available to drop into the page being built.

A sound strategy of how pages are linked, keywords to use for each category, and titled will in the long run be easier to maintain, and make upgrading later so much more easy, rather than trying to go back and change an ever increasing mountain of pages later as your strategy changes.

[BCutrer]

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last line. I would do it just for the social share pulling up the snippet that you have crafted versus some random part of the page getting ripped out of it.