One of the first steps to optimising your website for search engines is to make sure that your metadata is working for and not against your goals. But even with the very best intentions, it can take a while to see results. You can wait, refresh, clear the cache and wait some more, and your shiny new meta descriptions can still be stubbornly elusive.
This poses the question: exactly how long does Google take to update meta descriptions? Worry not: we’ll answer this and all of your questions as we delve deep into the peculiarities of metadata, and its place within the world of SEO.
What are meta descriptions, and are they important for SEO?
Meta titles and descriptions are an essential part of your website optimisation as they are possibly the first thing that a member of your public may see of your company if they first discover you on a search engine.
When someone types in their search query and you appear within the results, the meta title and description are the pieces of text that appear under your website name. Luckily these are editable, and can be easily changed both before and after you publish the page.
(NB: Metadata is not to be confused with the new name for Facebook et al – this meta is much more useful!)
If you input nothing into your meta title or description, your website’s content management system (e.g. WordPress) may autogenerate one. If nothing is supplied to the search engine at all, it will generate one for you, usually by taking a chunk of text out of the text of the page itself. While this may sound temptingly easy, it means that you could be missing out on a better-optimised bit of text – both for SEO purposes, and for telling potential customers exactly why they should click on your site.
Even if you have successfully ranked in the top three to 10 results on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), your meta title and descriptions are the secret sauce that makes you stand out from your competition. Properly optimised and creatively worded metadata can be a great tool for boosting clickthrough rates on your website, and shouldn’t be underestimated because of their small word limits.
So, how long does Google take to update meta descriptions?
The short answer is that there is no definitive, short answer.
Google crawls and indexes web pages at its own pace, and like many inner workings of the altar we all worship at, we don’t know exactly how it works. The result is that updates to meta titles and descriptions can take anywhere between a few minutes and a few weeks.
The way Google updates the metadata in its search results is by sending ‘bots’ to ‘crawl’ your website, and report back on what they find. This process is constantly ongoing, with bots revisiting sites periodically to update Google’s records. Depending on when you update your metadata, you could fall at the start or end of this cycle.
While there is no guarantee that your site will be indexed within a set time frame, there are a few things you can do to make it as easy for Google to crawl your site as possible – and even to expedite the process.
How to increase the speed that Google crawls your site
- Google favours rich and well-written content that enhances the web users’ experience. As such, make sure that everything on your site is engaging and interesting, with links to other engaging and interesting content on your own and others’ sites. Duplicate content is also a big no-no, and can lead to all sorts of negative impacts on your site.
- Regular updates to your site encourage Google to index it more frequently, so try to add new content on at least a weekly basis. There is a balance here, however: more than once a day won’t generally help, and you should make sure that it’s high-quality content that your audience will benefit from and enjoy.
- If you’re uploading plenty of content, make sure that your XML sitemap is also being updated regularly, and doesn’t contain any broken links or orphaned pages. If your website is overly convoluted in structure, Google’s bots can hit dead ends and get lost before even reaching your new page. Internal links such as those in menus or other pages act as roads to your new pages, helping both bots and users navigate the site more easily.
- A healthy site that loads quickly and provides a good user experience will usually get indexed more quickly than one that’s slow and janky. Regular site speed and technical audits will help you to keep on top of these easy-to-miss issues, which may affect users on slow devices without you realising.
- Work on building your site’s domain authority (DA) by building healthy and legitimate external links. Brand-new sites may benefit from regular content, but their low authority can also mean they will take a while to index, as Google has yet to figure out how trustworthy you are.
How to get Google to update meta descriptions
Updated your metadata, and want to see results as quickly as possible? To get Google to prioritise your meta titles or descriptions, you can follow these steps:
1. Make sure that the meta description tag is present on your web page. This is automatically added by most modern content management systems and SEO plugins, but is worth checking with your developers.
2. Ensure that the meta description is relevant to the content on the page and accurately describes the page’s content, with a unique description for every individual page. A better description will help encourage Click Through Rates (which inadvertently can help to improve rankings with positive user behaviour) but will also help to override Google’s self-generated metadata.
4. Check that Google isn’t ignoring your page by submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console (and that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking it!).
5. If you’ve made changes to your meta descriptions and want your page reindexed, you can submit the URL by navigating to Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool, and click ‘request indexing.’ This will put it into a queue to be indexed, but there’s no guarantee this will be faster than simply waiting for it.
A quick guide to metadata best practices
Now that you know how long Google takes to update meta descriptions, let’s take a look at a few of the best practices when it comes to creating impactful meta data yourself.
I’ve never written meta descriptions/titles before – what do I do?
Many content management systems will have a section dedicated to the metadata for a page, and will provide guides to help you update them, with clear indicators for character length and readability. In general though, there are a few clear guidelines to follow:
- Meta titles should be similar to the page title, and be kept under 60 characters. Include your brand name if you need to make up the length, but always put it at the end of the title, such as
‘Meta Description 101 – Gooey Digital’
- Meta descriptions can be a bit longer than titles, with roughly a 160 character limit, though 150 is best to ensure your message isn’t truncated. Use this to include your primary keyword in a way that reads naturally, and includes the key message of the page. You want your description to be so compelling that anyone reading it just has to click on your link.
- Try to think about your audience when writing your description. What is it they are looking for, and what would make them want to go to that particular page?
- Don’t use the same description for multiple pages, even if they have similar topics.
Can meta descriptions be the same as content on the page?
It is not generally recommended that you use content from the actual text on your page for the meta description. The meta description should be individually crafted to provide a brief and accurate summary of what the page is about, and there are few places within the content on a page where this would appear naturally.
Think of your page like a book, and the meta description as the blurb: A unique and compelling meta description should provide enough distinctive information about each page on your website to tempt someone to click through, even if those pages appear similar in theme.
I changed my meta title, but Google is showing something different.
First of all, check that your page has been re-indexed (i.e. updated by Google) via Google Search Console. Remember that this can take some time, so in some cases, you may need to be patient.
Sometimes, however, Google simply decides that your metadata doesn’t match the user intent for that particular search term. The fact that you are appearing means that it thinks your content is a useful resource, but that you are presenting it in your title doesn’t reflect this. There are a few things you can do to try and avoid this:
- Make sure your meta title and H1 heading (usually the page title) match, where it is suitable. Oftentimes, when Google doesn’t like your proposed meta title it will use your page title instead, so if these match it can’t do this.
- Try to avoid using separators too often, especially to separate keywords, as this can be something that triggers Google to reject a meta title.
- Don’t keyword stuff. Not only will it not make sense for a user, Google hates it and may reject it.
Final thoughts
Meta titles and descriptions are just one of the many ways that a website can be optimised to appear higher on search engine result pages. They tend to form part of a much larger, wider-reaching digital strategy to make sure that your website is working hard to draw in traffic, and get you the customers or clients that you really want.
If you’d like help with making your website all that it can be, or a helping hand with your social media, paid advertising or any other aspect of digital marketing, give us a call for a quick, friendly chat to discuss your options.