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With all the debate around the changes to how Google displays snippets in the search results in May, Google may do away with the meta descriptions section in the HTML improvements area in the Google Search Console.
Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter in response to why Google shows these in Search Console if they don't want SEOs or webmasters to focus on them:
And also short/long flags in Search Console don't give specific counts. But even these generic flags are not where we want focus, so they will not migrate to the new Search Console...
Yes, he said out right "they will not migrate to the new Search Console" although right before he said that, John Mueller of Google said they might not be migrated to the new Search Console.
Here is the Twitter stream:
It's hard for SEOs not to think about limits and numbers when Search Console implies something different from what you "keep saying"...
— Rohan Ayyar (@searchrook) June 6, 2018
I asked @JohnMu before, but didn't get an answer: https://t.co/l6t1PrRhr4
Confusion doesn't just stem from outside Google :-/ pic.twitter.com/xfpJmAJALJ
We looked into the Search Console report, the thresholds there are quite extreme. You're either providing a few words or a novel there -- neither is useful & imo it's worth letting sites know about it... or maybe we should just remove the report, that's an option too.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 6, 2018
Useful and actionable flags such as pages with duplicate or missing meta description tags will migrate. We also welcome ideas for other reports that might help with having good snippets.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 6, 2018
Why also remove the duplicate meta descriptions from that report? Well, very recently Google said that having duplicate meta descriptions doesn't break your site.
So it looks like it might all go away - is that something you want or do not want?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
