In the most recent talking circuit, Ted Kubaitis showed some very interesting findings concerning meta descriptions. In particular, he showed where and what was displayed in the SERPs from when meta description was changed.
The changes varied the number of match words or keyword variations that were displayed. That was the only change on the page and rank was affected.
2018 has been the year of “what’s old is new again.” Based on Ted’s extraordinary finding, we wanted to see if we could get a page to index based on keywords in the meta description and in the meta keywords.
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Transcription Below
This test idea comes from what Ted has been talking about at Rockstars and he has also been talking about for the last couple of conferences that he has spoken at, he found that there was a scenario as he was watching serps move that was being tracked by Cora, he found that there was a particular result where the metadescription or really what was displayed in the serps kept changing.
It would be one thing one time and something else the other time. Different keywords, and it moved rank. So the only thing changing on this page is essentially its metadescription.
It is not the true metadescription because it is not necessarily what the site put in, its what Google is pulling out either from the metadescription or content on the page but that is shifting it, that is apparently a factor – what Google is displaying and traditionally, that is what your metadescription is. Kind of getting into the what is old is new, Ted is seeing that phenomenon happen.
So what I want to see is can you actually index a page now with keywords in the metadescriptions and in the metakeywords cause the traditional idea is that, if you talk to a hundred SEOs, 99 of them not named Ted Kubaitis would tell you that the metadescription isn’t a factor. I want to see if maybe we can index a page now with keywords in these two locations.
I can tell you, there is no reason for any suspense, it didn’t work. So, this is what it looked like using SimpleSEO to get those keywords there and that is what it looked like and putting it there into the metakeywords into the code that way, neither of them would index. We could not index that way. So then I got thinking what Ted found a little bit.
As I mentioned, it wasn’t necessarily the metadescription that was being displayed, it was Google grabbing content either from the page or kind of piecing together parts of the metadescription. What I realized is, since that is clearly a factor, that impacted rank, the site did move, that is actually then a factor that Google completely controls. It is a factor that Google is using that is controlled by its own algorithm which is pretty trippy.
The idea that Google can grab different content on a page, put it into its display area on the serps and that is going to impact rank, that means that the algorithm has its own factors that it controls.
I think maybe the bigger take away there is, if you have a page that Google is ignoring your metadescription, which happens from time to time.
For a particular keyword, Google will ignore your meta and pull from the page. Do not let Google do that. What we found is if you are using content that is actually on your page and in the metadescription, you have a much better chance of Google not ignoring your meta.
The other thing you can do too, where it often happens, let’s say your primary keyword is buy red bicycles, let’s say your page also ranks for buy red mountain bicycles but you didn’t have that in your metadescription because you were just talking about buy red bicycles, and then Google will grab something from your page and put it in.
As we’ve learned from our tests, you can write a longer metadescription than the 300 or 150 characters, whatever it is that Google is displaying, you can write multiple metadescriptions and put them into your metadescription tag, and Google will pull from there.
So the idea is, if you have a primary keywords and say some very close or very strong secondaries that is really important for Google to take your metadescription that you want, write longer metadescriptions that include those very close variations of your primary or really strong secondaries, those related searches. Just write bigger metadescriptions and I think that would stop Google from pulling content off your page. You control what Google is displaying and you don’t rinks this jump up and down on Google creating its own factor.