Does the meta description affect page ranking on Google?

Question

According to the following site

http://dailyseotip.com/meta-description-tags-and-ctr-the-new-way-that-meta-tags-affect-rankings/1448/

We’ve known for years that Google doesn’t consider meta descriptions as a factor in ranking websites. In fact, Google just recently stated in a blog post that “we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.” Can’t be much plainer.

But there is more to the story!

Google may not use meta descriptions in their rankings, but your meta description can actually influence your rankings. In fact, I expect meta descriptions to play an increasingly larger role in rankings in the coming months and years.

I have been searching though and not been able to find the original blog post.

Can anyone clarify if this is true?

Answer 1

(The Google post referenced wasn't recent, but a good two years before the SEO Tip one.)

You quoted the wrong bit, and distorted what was said (probably unintentionally), which isn't all that different from what everyone keeps saying: Write for humans, and the rest will mostly take care of itself. The real point there is:

If you are able to entice users to click on your website in the Google SERPs, then they return later and search for a similar keyword, your website will be ranked higher!

Good description -> more clicks -> better ranking (Slightly. In some cases.)

What's actually important in that process is people being made to click. The meta description isn't inherently helping the rank by simply existing, the way that an h1 tag is inherently important.

It's worth also noting that this is not a justification for tricking people into clicking with misleading descriptions, either. People will notice, and back out to the results to try something else. When Google notices this behavior, they actually offer to the block the offending site altogether(the assumption being that you immediately bounce back because the information was bad, false, etc.) which is obviously not what you're after. While the feature's announcement does say this wasn't currently being used as a signal for negative ranking, the option is left open, and would be a reasonable end result.

Answer 2

There's another post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog that is more explicit about the use of the description tag (Emphasis added):

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets [...] Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.

See also When is Meta Description still relevant? for more thoughts.