: Why don't websites have a "description" meta tag in the head section? I expected to see something like this in the <head> section of stackoverflow.com, for example: <meta name="description"
I expected to see something like this in the <head> section of stackoverflow.com, for example:
<meta name="description" content="A language-independent collaboratively
edited question and answer site for programmers."/>
There seems to be some evidence that the meta description is useful at least for some search engines.
stackoverflow.com/questions/53081/html-meta-keyword-description-element-useful-or-not
Why not include it? Is this tag a complete waste of bytes?
As an aside, when you google "stackoverflow", where does the "A language-independent collaboratively .." description get pulled from?
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Meta descriptions definitely aren't a waste of bandwidth. One of the things I dislike about SEO is that it gives webmasters a sort of tunnel vision when they design their webpage. And I think recent attitudes towards meta tags are a perfect example of this.
From time to time, we have to remember that there are other considerations to be had besides SEO/marketing when building a website. Sure, meta keywords, meta descriptions, etc. have very little SEO value these days, but that's not the (sole) purpose of those fields. Search engines aren't the sole consumer of meta data, which is important for much more than helping you rank better on Google.
When you bookmark a page, many browsers automatically fetch the meta description or even keywords. This enables users to browse their bookmarks and find old links much more easily. The same thing happens when you post a link to Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Some screen readers also allow users to preview a page by reading out its meta description, giving the user a more detailed overview of a page than just the title.
The point is, like semantic structure, meta information is useful because it enables users and programmers to do more with a document. These could be uses that you never thought of or that haven't even been invented yet (e.g. a wikipedia bot can pull meta descriptions from a webpage to add descriptions to external links; a browser history search engine can build faster indexes from each page's meta description). Not including meta data just because it doesn't improve your search ranking is really shortsighted, not the type of user-centric thinking that webmasters ought to be using.
Google will use your meta tag description for the listing, even if you are listed in DMOZ.
It will probably NOT help you rank higher, but it makes a lot of difference when it comes to conversion. That meta tag description is what people read when they decide to click on your website in the SERP.
When I search for something on Google, about 4 results appear on my screen in Firefox, and 6 in Chrome (I have to scroll down to see the rest). Which of these results I click on depends mostly on the title and the description. IF these results don't seem to be what I am looking for, I will scroll down for more.
Treat that metatag description as a free text ad for the page.
There seems to be some evidence that the meta description is useful at least for some search engines.
In general, meta tags are not useful. Google is over 90% of our traffic, and they only use the meta for site summary in the case where you aren't listed in DMOZ.
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.
We are listed in DMOZ so I see no reason to have 100+ bytes of meta site description in every page we serve over the wire. The benefit is trivial, and the aggregate impact is large.
As an aside, when you google "stackoverflow", where does the "A language-independent collaboratively .." description get pulled from?
See here:
Does an entry in DMOZ significantly help the ranking of a web site?
As mentioned, the description you mentioned is pulled from DMOZ. However, one reason they may not have a meta description is because StackOverflow is primarily user-generated content. As such, creating a relevant meta description isn't the easiest task. They may have thought that Google would do a better job of programmatically creating a search engine results snippet for any given question than they would have.
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