Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag
November 28th, 2006 by pamela
It may seem obvious, but there has always been a little confusion when it comes to the use of meta tag information, with some quarters saying that the meta description tag is important, while others say not. It is a well accepted theory that the meta keywords tag is not important, but in a Google Groups post Vanessa Fox, Product Manager at Google Webmaster Central Blog said that using the meta description tag is beneficial;
In response to an indexing query, Vanessa told the poster;
“For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page - in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.”
Not exactly earth shattering news but it’s always good to hear this type of info straight from the horse’s mouth (no offence intended to Vanessa!).
