: Meta descriptions for manual We have a text heavy, high quality and original content online manual for our software: http://www.scirra.com/manual/1/construct-2 I was about to embark on entering meta

@Angie530

It can't hurt - unless the time invested in writing meta descriptions is prohibitive.


Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is
completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page
as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including
descriptive information in the META tag for each page.


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Improve snippets with a meta description makeover at Google Webmaster Central

Whenever a user searches on a term which appears in the manual, Google will probably display a snippet of text from within the document rather than relying upon the meta description.

If you anticipate many other web pages linking to pages within your manual (in which case a user's non-specific search is more likely to pull up meta description contents) it makes sense to put together a meta description but, if you anticipate few incoming links (in which case users will likely be searching on specific terms which appear within your manual) you can probably hold off on drafting meta descriptions and let Google use the manual's contents for its snippets.

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