Meta Descriptions - Does Cutt's comment still hold true?

[GoAbroadKP]

When looking through my old research on Meta's came across this article on Search Engine Land where Matt Cutt's stated...

"In fact, Matt said for his own blog, he doesn’t bother to make meta descriptions for his own site. In short, it is better to let Google auto-create snippets for your pages versus having duplicate meta descriptions."(http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-dont-duplicate-your-meta-descriptions-177706)

Recently, I have seen Google continuously play around with my metas, pulling from some really weird places on the page, discrediting the meta that I have there..and more-or-less really f them up..

Does the community think that maybe what Matt said in 2013 still holds weight and we are just wasting time with metas since Google does what they want in that space anyways?

[Ria_]

I'd rather have as much control as possible over how my result is displayed in the SERPs. I think if you make your meta description relevant enough to your page that Google doesn't consider it not as good as theirs (at least for the more obvious queries. Can't please all those longtails), then you can use the description to really sell the page to the searcher.

I think Matt's saying though that it's better to specify no meta description at all than use duplicate descriptions across multiple pages.

[TomRayner]

I think Matt's point was that he'd prefer to let Google generate meta descriptions - in the hope they'd be unique - rather than using the same one repeatedly.

My view? You should be writing unique meta descriptions for all of your key landing and sales pages.

Not for SEO - far from it.  But because it's the shop window that people will see before they reach your site via organic search.  You have a great opportunity to make it compelling, to attract the click away from others around (or above you) and to get your unique selling points across.

Google can never do a better job at that than you.

[EGOL]

I write all of my own meta descriptions and spend good time on them.   Much of the time, my meta description is grabbed and shown verbatim in the SERPs.  In that meta description I can give a nice list of topics covered in my article or features of a product or value proposition on shipping.   I read lots of meta descriptions and use them to decide if the page is worth a click.  I don't think that I am the only person who does this,

Why would I spend three days writing an article and then not write a nice meta description?  Or, not write a description with clever marketing for a product that I sell hundreds of per year.   Why would I not shoot finely-crafted arrows when I can?

Keep in mind that Google has a mentality to do everything with an algo.

And     that     can    be     a     huge      problem.

How many people have their adsense accounts banned unjustly with no possible appeal?  How much adwords advice is given poorly?  How many times does google email me that my traffic has fallen off a cliff the day after Thanksgiving?   How many times does their program send adsense policy violations in error?   How many times do they give the wrong person credit for images in image search?  How many times does their parameter management in WMT not work and you fix it yourself using htaccess?   Google is even know to list wrong numbers for police stations in knowledge boxes!   (Stopping here, I could keep going but you get the idea.).

Google has a philosophy that "we would rather do stuff half-ass at scale, than have a human tool do it right most of the time".   Doing stuff with algos at scale is OK much of the time and Google is quite good at it..... but my advice is do not allow google to do anything important for you that you can do for yourself.

I am going to bet on me, and if you think that you are a reasonably smart person, then maybe you should bet on you.