This may be true but do not forget you can use these sites for social citations or social signals. When you tweet or facebook your Business Name, Phone Number, Address, and Company Site this will work as a local citation which can help with your overall local search strategy. GREAT POST!

Thanks for your feedback! I think the main point to myth 1 is that as a ranking signal, the description tag is no longer utilized.

You are absolutely correct in your assessment that Google still considers the text, but I feel I should warn that it is not for the purpose of ranking a webpage higher in the results set. The best use of the description tag comes in the form of conversion rate optimization where the the goal is much more aligned with SEM best practices.

You want the description to jump out and grab a searcher thus bringing them to the page. The tricky part is keeping them engaged and coming back to that page or pages like it. Here is where things get interesting; the by-product of having a powerful description tag is that it attracts higher engagement levels and in return backlinks, which is a ranking signal. We know this is the case because Google has admitted to swapping out that text with what it considers a more useful description of the webpage.

The best way of looking at it is this: Description Tags are essential for traffic acquisition but not for ranking at the top of Google.

Thanks again!

They don’t. Search engines stopped placing any importance on the content of these tags years ago. It’s just too easy to manipulate them for the engines to really care what they say.

I have to disagree with this one. Sure they don’t carry as much weight as they used to, but Google still considers the text in the meta description as long as it is consistent with the content on the webpage. Ive test this out ;)