Google not pulling correct Meta Description
-
For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.
Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?
-
If you have an H2 on your page, maybe try to include same or highly similar wording in your meta description and try to avoid any sentences where relevant words to that page (or synonyms of such words) are not found on your page. I have tried with my own site in past and it has worked. No statistical evidence beyond what worked for my own site, but consider giving it a shot.
-
http://www.dmoz.org/ -> It's Open Directory Project, maintained by a community of volunteer editors, basically is directory trusted by the Search engines and many times the description from dmoz is used as snippet in the search results. When you submit a site for dmoz a human will verify and will accept your site only if it follow the guide lines.
Google can still display their own snippet but I think is worthy a try....
-
Sadly, Google often puts in their own snippet for the meta description, and will even change the meta titles on you too, depending on your query. There's often not a whole lot you can do about it, except take comfort that it happens even to sites like apple.com.
-
Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.
-
If Google Understand that your meta description is not as relevant to your page content or search query, they will replace with the content from your page that they understand as more relevant, To solve the issue you can try get list Dmoz, often search engine pull their description from dmoz or rewrite your meta description.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta Descriptions
Hi All, Just a quick question regarding Meta Descriptions, I am currently looking at a site where an awful lot of the Meta descriptions are similar (not 100% duplicated). The reason being is that the site contains a lot of the same products, but different weights. For example a 500g, 1kg & 2kg version of the same product. Therefore the Metas are same, apart from the weight that's being discussed. In my opinion the duplication is probably a little too close. Do you think in this circumstance its better to have no Meta descriptions defined at all? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Impact of changing title and description.
When a site doesn't rank for keywords, is this advisable to keep changing the title, description and other on page factors of a page , say home page, until it ranks? Will that impact on improvement? Or else will it be counted in the negative side?
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Google News Sitemap
Currently for our website Thinkdigit, we are using a rss sitemap (http://www.thinkdigit.com/google_sitemap/news_rss.php) for news. Please let me know is this the right format or we should use xml format only. Also we have lost a huge chunk of traffic from news search, Previously it used to be around 10,000 visit from google news, now it is just 300 visit per day.
Technical SEO | | 9dot90 -
How to solve the meta : A description for this result is not available because this site's robots.txt. ?
Hi, I have many URL for commercialization that redirects 301 to an actual page of my companies' site. My URL provider say that the load for those request by bots are too much, they put robots text on the redirection server ! Strange or not? Now I have a this META description on all my URL captains that redirect 301 : A description for this result is not available because this site's robots.txt. If you have the perfect solutions could you share it with me ? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | Vale70 -
Google description showing latest post excerpt
In doing a search for our website, The Tech Block, I realized that our description is not showing what we have in our Yoast settings, but rather the content from the slider: http://d.pr/i/kGjB What can I do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Google Sitelinks
We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week. However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page. I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page. Why are they not linking to the right page? I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?! Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ahamill0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0