In This Article
Bad SEO and Meta Descriptions
Google recommends avoiding the following four types of "bad" meta descriptions:
- List of keywords: “Baking, cakes, bake a cake, birthday cake, bake”
- Same description used for every news article: “Local bakery in Sandton, baked fresh and delivered to your doorstep. Order yours today.”
- Doesn’t summarize the page: “Preheat your oven for at least 20 minutes before putting your cake in. When the oven is at the right temperature, your cake will rise quickly in the nice hot heat.”
- Too short: “how to baking a cake recipe“
Examples of better meta descriptions from Google
- Explains what the shop sells and details like opening hours and location. “Get freshly baked pastries delivered to your doorstep. Open Monday-Friday 8-5pm, located in Sandton City.”
- Use a snippet from the specific news article: “We have been a family-run traditional German bakery for over 40 years, we are committed to providing you the most heavenly and delicious authentic cakes, cookies, and bread, baked according to century-old traditions.”
- Summarize the whole page: “Learn how to bake a birthday cake with this complete guide in 1 hour or less. We cover the most popular cakes including Carrot Cake, Sponge Cake, and Red Velvet Cake.”
- Are specific and detailed. “Birthday cake recipes that are simple and easy: Learn how to make birthday cakes with this simple birthday cake recipe from Cakes are Us, Sandton.”
The updated document. Google published its documentation on controlling your snippets in search results in October. You can see all the new additions, here.
Why we care. While there's nothing groundbreaking here, and it's mostly just basic SEO, it's nice to see Google provide some more specific guidance on how to create helpful and descriptive meta descriptions that are more likely to generate clicks and traffic. Of course, we can never count on Google to use those meta descriptions.
