Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about whether meta descriptions are pointless. His answer may be somewhat surprising to SEOs who are interested in how to write a good meta description and who are frustrated when Google overwrites them.
An SEO Says Meta Descriptions Are Pointless
An SEO on Reddit asked whether meta descriptions have become useless and pointless based on something another SEO posted on social media. The sentiment that they are useless was grounded in the idea that Google rewrites them, removing any incentive or point to create them in the first place.
Writing Meta Descriptions Is Not A Requirement
The Redditor asked:
“Meta descriptions pointless and useless?”
Another Redditor answered:
“It’s true. Not because he said it, but it’s been true for 20+ years.”
Google’s John Mueller answered:
“Yes, but also, there’s no penalty to writing your own, and sometimes it helps you to figure out a clear focus for a page. Overall, I think it’s still worthwhile to do so for individual pages that you care about, but it’s definitely not a requirement.”
Mueller’s response had three nuances that are worth exploring.
The obvious takeaway is that meta descriptions are not required and, secondly, that there is no penalty for not writing them. His response aligns with Google’s own guidelines, which strongly imply that meta descriptions are not necessary.
Google’s official documentation explains:
“If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.”
Meta Descriptions Are Not Pointless
So, while it’s not necessary to create them for every page of a website, Google still recommends writing them for the most important pages. There are many longstanding reasons why it’s important to write meta descriptions for important pages.
One of the obvious ones is product pages. Many times the information for product pages is scattered throughout a web page, with data about the price, reviews, the product manufacturer, and model listed in different parts of the page, which makes it hard for Google to create a snippet for that.
Google’s own guidelines for meta descriptions explain another reason why they are not pointless:
“The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include information about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information.
This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together.”
So, if a site owner takes off their SEO hat and puts on their Brand Manager hat, then they will see that it can be important to control the content in the meta description in order to have a consistent and attractive meta description that communicates how the company would like to be perceived.
SEOs used to call Google’s automated snippets ransom notes for a reason. They’re not always the coherent message that a site owner would like to present. So, if it matters how a company is perceived by consumers or the audience, then it makes a lot of sense to at least create meta descriptions for the most important
Figure Out The Page Focus
The third takeaway is quite likely the most interesting. Mueller said the act of writing a meta description is itself a useful exercise because it forces the site owner (or the SEO) to think about what an individual web page is about. The act of writing a meta description can help identify whether the web page is really about the topics the authors intended.
Even when Google ignores a meta description, summarizing a page in one or two short sentences requires a publisher to articulate what the page is actually about. That kind of clarity about the content has value in terms of understanding whether the page is actually optimized for the intended audience and topics.
Google Recommends Prioritizing Important Pages
Mueller’s answer aligns with Google’s own guidance, which recommends prioritizing the content itself over fussing over meta descriptions. Google’s guidelines recommend focusing on writing meta descriptions for critical pages if creating meta descriptions is a burden, especially if there are thousands of pages.
What that means is that site owners don’t need to write unique descriptions for every page; the homepage, key landing pages, and high-traffic content are where the effort is most likely to be useful in terms of controlling what is shown in Google’s search results so that a part of a website’s personality or branding can shine through.
Meta descriptions are optional, but they are also not pointless. If all you look at is whether or not it serves a ranking purpose, then yes, a meta description is pointless. But if you take off the SEO hat and put on a marketing and branding hat, then a meta description becomes important, arguably more so in these days when brand is becoming the new backlink.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI
