Does meta description affect crawlability?

UBF · 10-31-2006, 04:50 AM

I have a recipe site www.mychickenrecipes.com and have received a fair PR4 ranking. The main page is crawled every 2-3 days but the subpages are not being indexed. Some of them have been online for 4 months without being indexed.

I use Google sitemap and have tried to do some fair internal linking to have all the pages indexed.

Everything works great with MSN but somehow Google is giving me a hard time.

I read an article about using different meta descriptions for each page so I am trying that now (+ adding the name as the last part of the text in the footer). Hopefully I'll see some effect within a week or two.

Has anyone had the same experience and what did you do about it?

LazySEO · 10-31-2006, 11:09 AM

The description tag doesn't usually affect spidering. I think it's just used as the excerpt in the SE results once your page is already spidered and ranked. (I could be wrong, but that seems to be the general consensus.)

Marketing Guy · 10-31-2006, 12:05 PM

Well it could technically have an indirect impact on crawl depth. If Google judges your site (rightly or wrongly) to be of a low quality, then they won't crawl as deeply and regularly as a "normal" site.

One factor that could contribute to this is using the same description on each page. The reason for this is that this could be an indicator that the pages are autogenerated for SEO - ie, the same text with keywords replaced on a page to page basis.

Another factor influencing crawl depth is also link popularity.

I'd suggest re-writting each description for your pages so each is unique (and "descriptive" of the page) and working on building more links to your site.

MG

Web Gazelle · 10-31-2006, 12:09 PM

The Meta Description is what is displayed by Google when your site is found by doing a search. They will use it if it is more than just a couple keywords. It doesn't effect how often the site is crawled.

bcombs · 10-31-2006, 01:12 PM

I have never seen any indication that meta description affects crawlability in any way.

Brian

UBF · 10-31-2006, 01:25 PM

Thank you for all your comments. I've changed the descriptions so that the are all unique. Would be a shame to be taken for an auto-generated site when its not.

But if isn't the meta descriptions that does is has anyone else a suggestion what might cause the deeper pages not to have been spidered after a few months (when given the fact that the main page is spidered every 2-3 days)?

Not having enough backlinks can't be the only answer (as I see it).

bermuda · 11-02-2006, 03:32 AM

Well, you should organize your website in an seo and Google friendly manner, Robots are machines and not human and need help in indexing web pages.

UBF · 11-02-2006, 03:36 AM

Well thats what I thought I did. Anything specific that you're referring to?

bermuda · 11-02-2006, 03:55 AM

No, I was just quoting your saying that you would be really not happy if Google regards your web pages as auto-generated.

Sometimes, search engines need extra help in indexing web pages, that's why in many websites you see several internal navigation system at the top, right, left and at the buttom of the page to make sure web pages are indexed.Good Luck!

Manish Pandey · 11-02-2006, 06:26 AM

Well one thing that I could think of this time was that... providing new and fresh links to your website... and ofcourse give it some more time...

UBF · 11-02-2006, 06:29 AM

Building the external links daily

Thank you all. Just had to make sure that I didn't make any obvious errors.