{"id":53878,"date":"2020-09-10T07:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=53878"},"modified":"2021-07-26T16:37:58","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T23:37:58","slug":"how-often-google-ignores-our-meta-descriptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/seo\/how-often-google-ignores-our-meta-descriptions.htm","title":{"rendered":"Study: How Often Google Ignores and Rewrites Our Meta Descriptions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Since search engines started using meta descriptions in their search result snippets, they’ve always had the challenge of deciding what to display when the meta description won’t work or isn’t relevant. Usually, a search engine will take an excerpt from the page when a meta description tag isn’t viable. To prevent search engines from taking bizarre excerpts from pages to make a snippet, SEO practitioners<\/a> have put great attention into making sure meta descriptions are present, unique, and descriptive.<\/p>\n

This worked great for a while. An SEO could rely on the search engines to use the meta descriptions we wrote the majority of the time, but that has been changing. In the last few years, Google has been displaying content excerpts in the snippet over meta descriptions more and more. And this is distressing for SEOs because we spend a lot of time making sure our meta descriptions are good!<\/p>\n

So a question arises: how often does Google ignore our meta descriptions? How often is Google displaying some other text in their SERP and ignoring our hard work? Recently, Ahrefs published some original research<\/a> on the topic and found that Google disregards a page’s meta description 63% of the time<\/strong> for pages in the top 10 results.<\/p>\n

I thought that figure was pretty high. I believe it, but I don’t want<\/em> to believe it. So, to corroborate Ahref’s research, I pitched an idea to Matthew Henry<\/a>, our SEO Fellow and technical wizard: let’s do our own version of this research and see if we get a similar result. If Google is fairly consistent and both Ahrefs and we have a comparable sample of keywords, we should get roughly the same results. Isn’t replicating research the heart of the scientific method?<\/p>\n

Methodology<\/h2>\n

Before we get into the results, we need to talk about where we got our data. We used a list of 30,000 keywords taken from our existing and previous clients with brand terms filtered out. We entered the keywords into STAT Search Analytics<\/a> and pulled rankings for both desktop and mobile search results. Using STAT’s full HTML SERP export, Matthew scraped the display snippet descriptions from Google’s HTML after laboriously parsing Google’s wonky HTML structure.<\/p>\n

Matthew then wrote a custom scraping script to go through each search result URL and find the first listed meta description tag. The SERP descriptions and the meta description tags were added to an SQL database and checked to see if the text Google displayed was included in the meta description tag. If the SERP snippet text wasn’t included in the meta description text, we counted it as a case of Google ignoring the meta description.<\/p>\n

We didn’t render JavaScript, and we didn’t try to bypass clever firewalls. If we couldn’t retrieve a page or a meta description, we didn’t include it in the final data.<\/p>\n

Results<\/h2>\n

Below are our research results, which set out to analyze both desktop and mobile meta description rewrite rates based on the following conditions:<\/p>\n