Is the Meta Description Tag an Endangered Species?

We have all seen it when Google shows our pages in the search results and it doesn’t show our intended Meta description. It may take your Dmoz directory snippet or certain content from that webpage.

Some spammers in the past have used Meta descriptions to mislead the searcher and the search engine to what a page is about.  So it is no surprise that Matt Cutts has said in a Webmasters video that Google reserve the right to change what is displays in its Meta description and the webmaster really does not have total control over what the search engine will display.

However if you write great descriptive Meta tags that are super-relevant to the page content than this will go a long way in getting your desired description shown. If you also make sure your webpage content is super-relevant as Google may well use your webpage content as the snippet.

This seems to be a similar story to what happened to the keyword Meta tag, we may in the future see Google not supporting the Meta description at all.

As I mentioned Google may show your Dmoz description instead of your Meta description. In this case you can instruct Google not to do this by putting this simple code in the header of your webpage <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

What are your thoughts on this do you think you should have total control of what information Google shows about your webpage’s? Then let us know.  You can watch the aforementioned video with Matt Cutt’s below.



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About Graham Lyons

Graham is the SEO and Social Media Marketing Manager at Cozy Digital and the editor of the Cozy Digital Blog as well as contributing content for most of our social outlets like Facebook, Twitter and G+. Graham has been working in, and writing for the SEO / SMM industry since 2001 and is still as dedicated and passionate today as he was when he opened his first Website Design, Ecommerce and SEO company in 2004. You can connect with Graham and Cozy Digital via the social media links below:

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