Matt Cutts Offers Advice on Meta Descriptions
Matt Cutts just released a new Google Webmaster Help video that answers the question: “Is it necessary for each single page within my website to have a unique meta tag description?”
Creating unique meta descriptions for every single page on a website can eat up a lot of your time, especially if you have an ecommerce website with a large number of similar pages.
Cutts says that “you can either have a unique meta tag description or you can choose to have no meta tag description, but I wouldn’t have duplicate meta tag description.” He even reminds viewers that the Google Webmaster Tools console tells you if there are duplicate meta tag descriptions within your website.
He also says that “In general it’s probably, maybe, not worth your time to come up with a unique meta tag description for every single page on your site…” and sheepishly admits that he doesn’t even create unique descriptions for his blog posts.
If creating unique meta descriptions for all your pages is too much trouble, leaving your meta descriptions blank and allowing Google to automatically generate snippets for your pages is a better option, but Cutts says that for pages “that really matter”, like your homepage or featured products page, it might be better to create “unique, hand-crafted, lovingly-made” meta tag descriptions.
He also recommends creating your own meta descriptions if “there’s a few pages on your site with really bad automatically generated snippets.”
Outsourcing web SEO services can help solve your problems with duplicate meta descriptions or bad automatically-generated snippets. Our own on-page SEO specialists make sure your website has unique, well-written meta descriptions that tells users exactly what each page is about when they appear in SERPs, and can even apply the right markups to generate rich snippets for each page. Talk to us to start optimizing your website today!