Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?

Today's question comes from the Netherlands.

Walter wants to ask, is it necessary for each single page within my website to have a unique meta tag description?

Great question. Okay, so the way I would think of it is you can can either have a unique meta tag description, or you can choose to have no Meditative description, but I wouldn't have duplicate Meditative description.

In fact, if you register and verify your site in our free Google Webmaster Tools console, we will tell you if we see duplicate meta descriptions.

So that is something that I would avoid.

In general, it's probably maybe not worth your time to come up with unique meta description for every single page on your site.

Like when I blog, I don't bother to do that.

Don't tell anybody I told everybody.

But if there are some pages that really matter, like there's your homepage or pages that have really important return on investment, your most featured products, or something like that.

Or maybe you've looked at the search results and there'sa few pages on your site that just have really bad automatically generated snippets.

We try to do our best, but we wouldn't claim that we have perfect snippets all of the time in those kinds of situations.

Then it might make sense to go in and make sure that you have unique, handcrafted lovingly made meta tag description.

But in general, rather than have one meta tag description repeated over and over and over again for every page on your site, I would either go ahead and make sure that there is a unique one for the pages that really matter, or just leave it off.

And Google will generate the snippet for you.

But I wouldn't have have the duplicate ones if you can help it.