Can Changing Meta Descriptions Negatively Impact SERP's?

[robertrRSwalters]

I have just had a page start ranking well in key SERP's and I would like to change the meta description and add a price as we are extremely competative in that line.

Could changing the meta description now a page is ranking negatively impact the SERP placing?

Does anyone have any experience with this?

[CPU]

The meta description tag doesn't influence SERP's.

As you know search engines often use it as the description for your page in search results.As such a relevant, unique, compelling meta description can have a positive influence on how many clicks you get on your search listing.

[robertrRSwalters]

I guess what I mean is...

I know it is not supposed to influence SERP's but

Logically if a meta description changes radically I would imagine there would be some mechanisim thats is triggered for at least reviewing the SERP's placement for that page.

So the content of the meta description is irrelevant but the fact it may have changed would flag up somewhere in the Algo?

Its just a thought...

[Tompt]

I can see what you're getting at, but I agree with Lewis-SEO. Given that meta description is not visible on the page any changes (other than perhaps old school spammy) are just noted and displayed. If you were to change something on-page at the same time it may well get re-assessed, but that's not what we were discussing.

Even if it were to trigger a re-assessment all it would be doing is reviewing that page and putting it in it's "correct" place in the SERPs. Had you not done anything to it, it would still have dropped as soon as it was re-crawled regardless, all initiating a crawl would do is bring forward the inevitable.

Of course if we go on the theory that Google has started using user data; if the meta description changed how the page converted or how people reacted to the page (and you could check your analytics) it could effect your rankings.

Basically if users are now leaving your page in droves because of a misleading meta description that may have a knock on effect.

[robertrRSwalters]

I have added a price to the Meta Description.. as I believe we are selling this product @ the cheapest price in the country..

I agree it could bring forward any change in any case.

What do you think googles attitude is towards promotional Meta descriptions?

Hopefully a good meta tag that gets a click through would be taken into account ahead of a promotional meta description that mentions price.

What do you think?

[CPU]

The general line is that we should design for the user and not the search engine so if a meta description is compelling and attracts users then that would be exactly what you are doing.

If you believe that putting the price will increase the click through then I would go for it.

Had some advice from Will Critchlow when I asked about the use of the £ symbol in meta descriptions and he said that we should "use HTML encoding (£ rather than £). We tend to advise going for ASCII only as character encoding opens you up to a world of pain, but HTML entities should generally be fine"

[robertrRSwalters]

Good point Lewis.

How do so what code do I use? (£

I don't have much experience with this.

[johnd5789]

Hey Robert,

I was wondering what your experiences where with the changing meta descriptions?

My team was looking to do something similar with one of our sites and we are worried about changing meta descriptions and whether that would affect us negatively.

Thanks