Search engines love to know what each page is about, but more importantly it is Your Ad Space, Your Ad Copy, Your Call To Action on the search engine result page.
If you have a crappy non-attractive Meta Description you can
loose potential click-throughs to your site...
9 Comments
Comments
Thanks for sphinning my post "Search Buzz". I just had to rant! Dont worry I feel better now.
Hey imnotadoctor...I posted this on your blog...believe me when I tell you that they are not the only megasite to have horrid or non-existent SEO.I used to direct SEO for Viacom (i.e. CBS, although CBS has now split from Viacom and formed CBS Interactive). When I approached the execs for CBS.com about optimization they essentially told me to go suck an egg.Since then, I believe they hired a big agency to oversee SEO, but I’m not sure.The lesson is this: Just because a site is owned by a mega corporation doesn’t mean that they have their act together in terms of SEO.
Hugo-It is amazing how many negasites have I come across that ignore basic seo principles. I think I will start noting them down. It will make for a great blog post.
good idea!
While I find this amusing and also see it quite often, I don’t think that meta descriptions are really a priority for big corporate sites like CBS. They have the brand name and the important domain and people are still going to go there and search engines are going to give them priority. Plus, these sites (in particular cbs & abc) are still working on making their sites useful and interactive for users. Point being that even though meta descriptions are a pretty simple thing, its just not a concern for many.
Awesome post that displays the dangers of ignoring SEO perfectly. Great example.
There was some interesting debate recently about "outing" other sites for selling links and such. Here: http://sphinn.com/story/8393 and http://sphinn.com/story/8403 and here http://sphinn.com/story/8659Maybe "outing" sites for bad Metas isn’t the same topic, but... Maybe take Neil Patel’s advice and "start talking shit" directly to the big company instead? http://sphinn.com/story/8169 Maybe they’d listen and hire you rather than get pissed when they see your blog post.
@snarky -- good call....I enjoyed neil’s post!
I see rubbish meta descriptions on many sites out there.Having a duff meta description is akin to having a rubbish call to action in the text of your PPC ads. You wouldn’t do that there, so why forget to spruce up the meta description? The meta description is highly visible in the SERPs and is a major factor (only after perhaps position) in deciding which result a visitor is going to click on.I’ll often click on #2 or #3 if the title and snippet appears to be a better match than the #1 result for whatever it was that I was looking for.