Bypassing Meta Description & Meta Keywords

[Carlton]

Does anyone know to what extent it hurts your search engine ranking if your web pages DO NOT have a meta description and meta keywords in the header?

I've heard opinion, but am looking for real knowledge and a definitive answer from someone who knows SEO very well.

Thanks in advance for assistance.

 

[Carlton]

One more try. This must be a tough question.

 

[enlytend]

Does anyone know to what extent it hurts your search engine ranking if your web pages DO NOT have a meta description and meta keywords in the header?

The keywords tag, to all intent and purpose, is not used for rankings anymore. The last holdout of giving it any real value was Yahoo. But at SMX East in 10/2009:

Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag — prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

Confusing the matter a follow-up experiment by Danny Sullivan showed that they do indeed INDEX it...

Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag

However (from the same post), here's the clarification he received from Yahoo (bolded text added for emphasis):

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

IOW, ignore it and focus on more important parts of your site.

Google stated point-blank that they don't use the keywords meta:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

Re The Description Meta - Has "Very Little" importance for rankings, per the SEOMoz 2009 ranking factors survey.

The importance of a description is that it's (most of the time) the snippet people see in the search results. A good description will encourage click-through, a bad one will scare people away. Doesn't matter how many #1 rankings you have if your site description screams "I am keyword-stuffed spam".

There are additional implications to having strong click-through, now that personalized search is Google's default.

Having duplicate and/or irrellevant descriptions can HURT your site. They should always be unique to and descriptive of the page they are on.

Helpful?????

 

[Carlton]

enlytend - Thank you very much. Excellent, detailed input. Much appreciated. Sent 250 np$.