Posts Tagged ‘Google Yahoo’

Meta Descriptions do affect Your Google Rankings.

Meta Descriptions do affect Your Google Rankings.

Meta descriptions are the text snippets of the webpage you see in search results. Officially Google and Yahoo announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. But Google’s new personalized search is making Meta description a ranking factor again.

Google is tailoring everyone’s search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google. It use to be that when you signed into Google you got personalized results based on you search history. Now it happens whether your signed in or not, you will get personalized results.

This means that the sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries. For example if you search for ‘SEO ranking’ and visit seoranking/trafficsecretz.com, next time when you search for ‘SEO advice’ you may see seoranking/trafficsecretz.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the ‘View customization’ link in the upper right hand corner of the search box.

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. The more you search a keyword and click on a site the higher it will move up your personalized search result page.

So how do Meta descriptions affect your Google ranking?

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can affect your website position in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor in determining the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear higher up in their personalized search results.

Since everyone gets personalized results, the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can be really huge. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

So write a compelling title and description, one that will get the searcher to click on your site. Now Google doesn’t always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just
compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query.