Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?



Is it necessary for each single page within my website to have a unique metatag description?
Walter, Leiden, Netherlands

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31 thoughts on “Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?”

  1. If there is no meta tag description for a particular page does that me that page will not rank in searches ? If this is a silly question, pardon me I'm just new to this SEO stuff but I really need an answer

  2. Hello!

    Are these metadatas considered duplicate?

    " Brown and Green Abstract Painting from X. Order original paintings directly from artist."

    " Yellow and Black Abstract Painting from X. Order original paintings directly from artist."

    Writing unique metadatas for each item could be daunting and irrelevant.

  3. Since we set the meta-description for one of our websites manually for each and every page, we observe the click-through rate declining. I think it's best to leave it up to Google to take care of it.

  4. Am I wrong in thinking that Matt Cutts may just be making a usability best practices recommendation here, rather than laying out an SEO quality guideline? He is on record in 2009 as saying meta descriptions don't influence rankings. So has this changed or is yesterday's statement more about creating metas that are more useful to users?

  5. We have to keep in mind that google very often will show in the SERPs what they "think" matters more to you, so sometimes i think you can leave the description blank. but i tend to agree, either put original ones but not duplicate ones, makes sense. well done Matt Cutts 

  6. (Oops….don't tell anybody…) It seems like Google wish that we all stop doing SEO and focus on content quality will do, perhaps with some important keywords existed in the content — so that snippets can be auto-generated with bold user search terms. ^^

  7. How would you handle the meta description of paginating pages of i.e example a category which you broke down to 10 pages, but which you already have the link rels prev and next? Take out the meta descriptions from all pages 2-10?

  8. Let me translate from Mattspeak into English for you.

    Yes, it's preferable and more beneficial to have unique meta descriptions on each and every page of your website. However, if time and/or resources do not permit, then it's OK to have no meta description on the pages that don't have unique meta descriptions.

    However, whatever you do…DO NOT have duplicate meta descriptions on any page.

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