Meta description may or may not be responsible for ranking

John Mueller answered if meta description tag matters for ranking purposes. This was a good question as Google advises using descriptions on web pages.

The meta tag is also known as the meta element. This tag is to represent document-level information about a web page.

Meta elements have attributes to describe different properties of the web page. This extends the meta element so that it can provide a specific kind of information to a web browser or a web crawler (like Googlebot).

A meta robots tag communicates to crawl. A meta refresh tag communicates to a browser. There are many meta tags like meta name=” viewport”, meta HTTP-equiv=” refresh”, meta name=”google-site-verification,” and meta name=” Googlebot” content=”notranslate”.

These communicate directly with search engines and browsers.

The W3C is the standards-making body responsible for defining HTML. Meta descriptions are for use by search engines, said the official W3C specification.

It stated, “The value must be a free-form string that describes the page. In addition, the value must be appropriate for use in a directory of pages, e.g., in a search engine.

There must not be more than one meta element with its name attribute set to the value description per document.”

Meta descriptions generate search results snippets. The meta description displayed in the search results will also communicate to the potential website visitor.

There is no limitation to the length of a meta description.

However, there are limitations to how much meta description can get shown by search engines.

John Mueller answered that the use of description is as a snippet in the search results page.

Having a good snippet on a search results page can make it more interesting for people to visit your page. In addition, understanding meta elements and the meta description tag helps build a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together for SEO.