SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Forcing Google to Respect Meta Descriptions

SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Forcing Google to Respect Meta Descriptions
This week on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen to organic traffic when we forced Google to respect meta descriptions, instead of pulling content from elsewhere on the page into search results. This is what they thought:

Screenshot of Twitter poll

This was by far our closest #SPQuiz result so far, with a tie for Positive and Inconclusive, each on 35.7%, and Negative not too far behind in third place. It seems our followers’ opinions were incredibly divided, with no consensus on what would happen.

In fact, the smallest group were correct! Forcing Google to respect meta descriptions turned out to harm organic traffic in this case, as you’ll see when you read the details below.

The case study

A recent study by Portent’s Evan Hall found that around 70% of search results have a snippet in their search results that is not taken from the page’s meta description. There are various reasons why this might happen – Google may choose to rewrite descriptions to include phrases that the searcher includes in their query, or simply that it perceives to be more relevant to users. Some pages don’t even have meta descriptions, while some websites use the same meta description across wide swaths of their pages, which means it’s easy for Google to find something more suitable to use in search results.

One particular SearchPilot customer had noticed that their meta descriptions on a location-related page type were consistently being ignored by Google. Instead, snippets of text were often being pulled in from the site’s navigation menu and facets, listing nearby locations. This wasn’t a case where the meta descriptions were missing or irrelevant – the SEO team were pretty confident that they had written good descriptions!

Luckily, there was a solution at hand. Since September 2019, Google has provided the option of adding data-nosnippet attributes to elements, which instruct Google not to use that part of the page for snippets in search results.