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| Advanced Meta Description Tag |
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Does Google use the Meta Description tag to boost onsite words for ranking purposes?
Test started: 9 Mar 2010
Status: not complete yet
Update: no updates yet
This test follows on from an earlier simple meta description tag test where we proved that, as Google mentions, it does not use meta descriptions for ranking purposes, at least not directly for words only appearing in the meta description.
The earlier test had words just in the meta description which did not appear anywhere else on site, and the test page was not listed in google results when running a site: search on those words.
But this does not mean that there is no indirect benefit of words in the meta description. The most immediate next level of indirect benefit is where the meta description words might be used to give a slight boost to words already in the onsite content. It is this next level which this test is aimed for.
More indirect levels of benefit might include screen scraped links and descriptions screen scraped from search engine results and used to provide links and content to sites using web scraping, although this is a very tenuous benefit at the most, especially since Google has now made it very difficult to web scrape its results.
Even more removed indirect levels of benefit come from the advantages that good snippets of information can make to search results click-throughs. Whilst conversion is always a good thing, this is an extremely indirect benefit for immediate SEO, about as indirect a benefit as having a 'nice' text, or a 'nice' site, or saying 'value' instead of 'low quality' to make your site attractive to customers.
This test will involve 2 pages which both target the same primary word in conjunction with targeting different secondary words (to avoid duplication), e.g. carp fishing and pike fishing (or perhaps even better still, some primary word that has different meanings when associated with the secondary word). As best we can, we will apply the same amount of optimisation on both pages. We will then see which page ranks higher for the primary term. We will then introduce the primary keyword into the meta description of the lower ranking page, (whilst adding a dummy word to the other page to keep changes equal), see if ranking changes, then do the same to the other page, then gradually remove one then the other words from the meta description to see what happens (this will take some time, waiting for google to reindex the content each time).
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