Does updating meta descriptions affect crawl frequency or only... — What we ship

chef_carol

I know that Google says meta descriptions aren't a direct ranking factor, but I'm curious whether updating meta descriptions across a large number of pages has any impact on crawl frequency or indexing. Has anyone observed changes after updating only meta descriptions without modifying page content?

Originally asked by OneTech Digital on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Variant 57.

Variant 3627.

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Not in any way you can count on. Google's crawl budget documentation lists what drives crawl demand: how popular the URLs are, staleness (recrawling often enough to pick up changes), and the site's size, update frequency and quality. Editing a meta tag doesn't notify Googlebot of anything; Google only sees the new description the next time it crawls each page on its normal schedule. When people do see a crawl bump after a bulk edit, check what else changed at the same time. Often the sitemap <lastmod> dates were all bumped. Google says it uses <lastmod> only when it's consistently and verifiably accurate, and that it should reflect significant updates (main content, structured data, links)....

Full answer by VPSPioneer: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/148996 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Want it for your business? UphillTech.