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October 28, 2010 5:40am
Subscribe [5]#1 / Oct 28, 2010 5:40am
Google is using some of the content from an <h3> tag under the search result instead of the meta description I provided. Is there a reason it does this? Every other site I’ve worked on it uses the meta description. Can you affect this? I know you can turn it off with nosnippet: but not sure about giving preference to what it uses on the search page.
#2 / Oct 28, 2010 6:06am
Google, like other search engines, will index most/all the text on a page and serve up what it thinks is relevant for any given search phrase, not necessarily your Meta Description.
Have you recently changed your Meta Description content?
#3 / Oct 28, 2010 6:06am
Yeah about a month ago.
#4 / Oct 28, 2010 6:46am
It could be that Google just hasn’t reindexed your pages since then, or it’s decied not to use them. Give it a few more weeks to see if they start appearing.
On another note I took off Meta descriptions on a lot of my sites and am getting better info with my listings 😊
#5 / Oct 28, 2010 6:52am
I’ll give it another month and see if anythings changed. It’s purely for vanity, it’s only a one page site but I just want it to use the meta description and not the content for the search result.
I only really use the meta description and author tags these days.
#6 / Oct 28, 2010 9:22am
Is the <head> of your site very cluttered, if it is then Google can sometimes passes over things, you should have all important meta info placed prominently in the <head>. I would usually go for:
< head
< title
< meta description
< keywords
< un-important stuff scripts etc.
< /head
#7 / Oct 28, 2010 9:28am
Not really, this is how it looks at the minute
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="Some description" />
<meta name="author" content="Some author" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1" />
<title>Home | Business</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/min/f=css/global.css" />
[removed][removed]
[removed]try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}[removed]
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
[removed][removed]
<![endif]-->
</head>#8 / Oct 28, 2010 9:33am
Is your description below 165 characters?
I know you should limit to 165 chars for description and have around 5 keywords but I’m not sure if this would effect it being read by Google, it might just truncate.
Also if you want to improve SEO you should maybe work on the <title> it’s a little uninformative 😊
#9 / Nov 12, 2010 8:19pm
If Google finds the keywords that were searched on in your description then Google will generally pull in your description but if they do not find relevant content that matches the search term within your description then Google will serve up content from elsewhere.
#10 / Nov 13, 2010 12:17pm
FYI it’s documented that Google no longer relies on Meta ‘description’ and ‘keywords’ data and likely will ignore it due to abuse.
#11 / Nov 15, 2010 12:48pm
FYI it’s documented that Google no longer relies on Meta ‘description’ and ‘keywords’ data and likely will ignore it due to abuse.
JT, although that has been true for the meta “keywords” tag for near 8 year now that is not the case for meta description tags. The meta description tag is not used by google to help you rank better but IS used as the description for your listing when appropriate. You can verify this by just doing a search. Any listings that have nicely written descriptions are most likely being pulled from the meta description. (a quick look at “view source” for a page can verify this)
The way to get the listing to show your meta description is to include the targeted keyword phrase(s) within a nicely written description. I have done this for years and it still works today.
#12 / Nov 19, 2010 11:08pm
Is your site listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)? Google sometimes pulls the description from there instead of your meta tag. You can disallow it with
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">