When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
-
I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S
I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version.
**My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
-
I believe that this is going to be such a tiny tiny benefit that it might move you up from position 998 to 997, but if you are in the top 30 positions in the SERPs it will have zero impact.
It is also possible that the longer your description, the smaller the impact on any keyword.
I would invest my time in short, hot descriptions that elicit clicks.
-
Thanks Oleg.
Couldn't it help (even if a little) with ranking if the term that is in the meta description (the long one) wouldn't have been there otherwise?
-
Sure, it could match the search term and move around to display in serps but it won't help with ranking. The other downside is now instead of a complete message (which is the goal of a meta desc), you are letting G decide what parts to show and may not get your message across as you would like.
Ideal scenario is using the keywords within the max meta description length. No harm in going over, just not the best case scenario.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Slug best practices?
Hello, my team is trying to understand how to best construct slugs. We understand they need to be concise and easily understandable, but there seem to be vast differences between the three examples below. Are there reasons why one might be better than the others? http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/20/bad-boys-yum-yum-violent-criminal-or-not-this-mans-mugshot-is-heating-up-the-web/ http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/06/20/jeremy-meeks-sexy-mug-shot-felon-viral/ http://www.tmz.com/2014/06/19/mugshot-eyes-felon-sexy/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Best practices for a local business move
My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months. What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | easystreetint0 -
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
Hi there, We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories. Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees" The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well. Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking. Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page. Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well) Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it. Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arikbar0 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0