I knew this (and it's exactly what triggered my idea), but I beg to differ in one respect: meta description CAN BE a ranking factor through the CTR it determines. A high CTR can boost the website's ranking in the medium to long term, but optimizing the meta description is almost useless if G...
In the server logs I see Google attempting to crawl wrong URLs like:
/sectionX/pageA.php/pageB.php
which I suspect are caused by some kind of negative SEO, since such links never existed on this website.
Why negative SEO? Because such links generate duplicates and also lead to a waste of crawl...
My assumption is: Google tends to rewrite the meta description when it detects some kind of mismatch between the meta description and the page content.
My idea consists of using the following in the page content:
<hgroup>
<Hn>Heading N</Hn>
<p>Subheading / alternative title / tagline</p>...