Meta Description
Definition
A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a concise summary of a web page's content. It appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) below the title tag and URL. Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor — Google confirmed this in 2009 and has repeated it since — but they influence whether someone clicks your result once it is shown. Best practices: keep it around 150-160 characters, cover the search intent the page answers, and give a concrete reason to click. Google frequently rewrites descriptions using text from the page when it judges that a better match for the query.
How long should a meta description be?
Write for roughly 150-160 characters. Google truncates by pixel width, not character count, so there is no exact cutoff — around 920 pixels on desktop and less on mobile. Descriptions that run long are not penalized; they are simply cut with an ellipsis, so put the meaningful part first. Anything under about 120 characters usually leaves useful space unused.
Do meta descriptions affect rankings?
No. Google has stated plainly that meta descriptions are not used as a ranking signal. They affect click-through rate, and click behaviour can influence how a result performs over time, but the tag itself carries no direct ranking weight. Writing one is a conversion task, not a ranking task — treat it like ad copy for a listing you already earned.
Why does Google rewrite my meta description?
Google replaces your description when it finds page text that answers the specific query better. This is normal and happens to most pages for at least some queries — the description you write is treated as one candidate among several. Rewrites are most common when the query is long-tail or when the description is generic, duplicated across pages, or does not mention what the searcher asked about.
What happens if a page has no meta description?
Google generates one from the page content. For a well-structured page this is often acceptable, which is why missing descriptions are a low-severity issue rather than an error. The cost is control: an auto-generated snippet may pull navigation text, boilerplate, or a mid-paragraph fragment. Write your own on pages where the snippet does persuasion work — commercial, comparison, and landing pages.
Should every page have a unique meta description?
Yes, on pages you care about. Duplicate descriptions across many URLs give searchers no way to tell results apart and are a common flag in site audits. For large templated sets — product variants, paginated archives — generating descriptions from page data is fine, provided the output genuinely differs per page rather than repeating one sentence with a token swapped.
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