Is There a Penalty for Adding META Data Later?

[bgumpper]

I am launching a new site and am wondering if I can get it online and add the META data over time. As you know it takes a lot of time and I'm short on that but want the page up. Didn't know if the search engines added any importance to the first crawl or if each crawl determines the ranking at that point in time.

[PhilipSEO]

There is no penalty for adding meta data later. Penalties exist only for violating Google's guidelines. There is ni guidelines against adding meta data later.

If you have rich text content (as you should), the only "meta data" that seriously matters for your ranking is the title tag. Those should not take long to set.

Having good title tags should improve your rankings, and this will not happen until after you have your title tags. This is not a penalty though. Do not confuse penalties with a lack of benefits.

I hope this helps!

[bgumpper]

It does help, thanks.

I have almost all the title tags set and short descriptions for each product category so I'll go live once I finish that today.

I thought I read Google will cut the title tag short so is there a guideline for how long it too and how much is too long?