Meta data: Does Google actually ignore it?
There is always work being done behind the scenes when it comes to the digital marketing world, and this includes optimization that manually tells Google what a page is about with a number of different strategies!
However, recent studies within our industry are showing that meta descriptions, part of the overall metadata strategy in SEO, are being skipped over or rewritten in Google’s SERP.
Here is a great example of this with our client’s latest website launch. Our team reworked the metadata, but Google still changed it.
This study from Portent shows that 71 percent of their content that was ranking on the first page of SERP had meta descriptions that were rewritten. The content that was rewritten the most was rankings between four to six while one to three rankings stayed the same.
As Ahrefs’ study showed, about 63 percent of meta descriptions were completely skipped over and the content within the first paragraph of the page or blog was utilized instead for featured snippets.
If meta-descriptions are being rewritten by Google’s bots, what is metadata and how important is metadata for SEO?
What is metadata?
First, let’s break down what is metadata and which part of the metadata we are speaking about when it comes to Google ignoring it.
Metadata is all of the manual information that is implemented on the backend of the website that tells search engines what your page is about. These are small pieces of information that are added onto the backend of the website that are not always visible to the searcher, but are visible to search engines.
While this will look different based on the CMS system that the company is using, this is the information that is entered into the backend of the website! There is the title, description, H1 and H2 and canonical URL if need be!
How important is meta data for SEO?
Yes, while Google is changing descriptions and taking content from the blogs or elsewhere on a page for the description instead, metadata is still relevant and important.
The thing is, there are a couple of reasons that the information is being changed.
One of the main reasons that this information is being changed is because Google is trying to make it more relevant to the search query at hand. This is Google’s way of showing the relevance between the search query and the search result that populated.
Another reason is that the meta description is too short which means Google pulls in more information to fill in the rest of the description.
This information is still pertinent to the overall SEO strategy set in place because it still tells Google what the page is about and its ready for review!