For those that don’t know, meta descriptions are a hidden part of each of your webpages. They play an important part in your search engine optimization strategy so much that you can see the results in the above picture what happened to the traffic when they were accidently removed and subsequently re-enabled:
In Google, when you search for a something, it will usually show part of the meta description below the website URL in search results. See the picture on the left to see what I’m talking about. The text that shows up is the text in the meta description for Giant Concepts.
By complete accident, I recently overwrote the default setting for the Meta Description on one of Giant Concepts websites. This careless mistake led to a dramatic drop in organic search traffic for this website. The website has over 2000+ pages indexed in Google, and all of them lost their Meta Description. I certainly don’t check that my Meta Descriptions are in place on a daily basis on all our websites, but I do periodically check my analytics to look at current trends on all the websites that we maintain. It took nearly two weeks for me to notice that this website had significant drop in organic search engine traffic (it actually only affected Google traffic, as Bing and Yahoo remained consistent). The graph not only shows how quickly and dramatically the traffic dropped but how fast it came back once it was re-implemented.
If your website is not performing as you’d like it, try adjusting your Meta Descriptions. It is a reminder of how important properly worded Meta Descriptions can be for your overall search engine marketing strategy. Here are a few suggestions for properly worded Meta Descriptions, not a complete guide but enough to get you on your way:
- Meta Descriptions should be between 145 – 165 Characters.
- Should NOT just be a bunch of keywords separated by commas.
- If you are doing ecommerce, each of your products should have a different meta description.
- Each unique page that is search relevant (non search relevant pages would be: contact forms, privacy policy, etc) should have a meta description.
- If you have one or two specific keywords you are targeting, you might want to use those words 2 or 3 times in your meta description.
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Next time you anger your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, you might want to check first if your former love interest is an SEO genius – which makes us wonder what heinous dating crime Jack Weppler committed to deserve having his former girlfriend plaster his mug all over Google Images annotated with what the guy’s mother referred to in a removal plea to Google Webmaster Help as “slanderous, defamatory and pornographic captions.”
Despite the ex-boyfriend’s mommy’s complaints on her son’s behalf and the subsequent removal of these allegedly copyrighted photos from the offending host servers, the images held steadfast to Google’s index, refusing to budge.
Here’s the thing – even if the images seem to be gone from the sites to which they were posted, the pages are still returning 200 status codes instead of the “page not found” status necessary for removal from Google… which means they’re not going anywhere.
Might want to check that the lover you’ve scorned isn’t an evil memetic mastermind next time… unless you want to face a reputation management nightmare that could follow you the rest of your life.
When and if this happens to you or your employer, you might find yourself calling a reputation management company like us!
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In a recent blog post, Google presented evidence that Microsoft Bing is simply copying search results from Google. While on the surface it does appear from the evidence that this is the case, it is actually a little bit more complicated as Microsoft seems to be extracting the results based upon the actions of users of IE8 with suggested sites turned on and/or the Bing Toolbar.
Bing claims they are a decision engine, and they help their users make better decisions through their search. My question is this – is utilizing their users’ data to fill in the gaps in their own search engine stealing or simply improving upon their own search results by helping their users to find what they are looking for through utilization of the data that they collect?
How do you feel about Microsoft utilizing this tactic?
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Have you ever typed someone’s name into a search engine? How about a phone number? Did you know that in 2009, Pew Internet did a survey and found that 69% of the United States population with Internet access had searched for information about a person or a business?
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