Google snippet chosen why?
-
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property".
http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp
If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet:
- Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR.
However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page:
- A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ...
Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
-
If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet:
- Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR.
Looking at the relationship of the location, and the word sales. Means a user wants to buy, and your description contains that phrase.
However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page:
- A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ...
User is looking for general info on the subject, and your on page does the job well. Almost sounds like a magazine article.
It sounded like you were asking for an exact answer. There you go.
Google is most likely looking at the relationship between the words, and trying to serve the best result to interest a user aka Hummingbird in action
-
Hi,
Its not new that Google changes the page titles and descriptions.
Here you go for more:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2342232/Why-Google-Changes-Your-Titles-in-Search-Results
and here..
http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
They mostly look at the relevancy of the snippet to your query, and by copying in the META description here in my opinion I can agree with what Google did there. Your longer query: "megeve property for sale", the words: "for sale" are in your META description so Google might favor that over creating their own snippet. For the more general query they probably didn't like that the query wasn't in your META description and decided to pick a snippet from the page that included it.
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
-
How get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Is Google Filling in Search Forms?
Hi Mozers, Is it true that Google will fill in search forms and thus generate potentially thousands of pages by itself? We have a spike in number of pages indexed and it corresponds with the time we added an advanced search form to the site... Thanks for the advice! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Rich snippets error?
hello everyone, I have this problem with the rich snippets: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.visalietuva.lt%2Fimone%2Ffcr-media-lietuva-uab The problem is that it says some kind of error. But I can't figure it out what it is. We implemented the same code on our other websites: http://www.imones.lt/fcr-media-lietuva-uab and http://www.1588.lt/imone/fcr-media-lietuva-uab . The snippets appear on Google and works perfectly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
The only site that has this problem is visalietuva.lt I attached the image to show what I mean. I really need tips for this one. gbozIrt.png0 -
Google Manual Action Disappear
Hi Guys, I have a website that received unnatural link message. We had started link removal process, disavowed not approachable links and file reconsideration four times but all the times Google sent some samples of unnatural links and rejected our reconsideration. Last week we again disavowed non approachable links and planned to file reconsideration after a week but today when i tried to file reconsideration, Manual action message was disappeared. We haven't received any message from Google. The same case was happened with one more of our site earlier. Manual action disappeared means it has been revoked or something else??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Buying a Google News website, against Google Terms?
We are looking at buying a business that has a number of websites Is it against buying a business that has a Google News website and continue to use the site? Once the business is sold, would google remove the site from its News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Dropped Out of Google and Bing
I am helping with a site that at one time I had on page 1 for Google/Bing. Site started to slip in rankings, then someone else did a makeover of the store and botched things by renaming pages, having errors in pages (multiple head/body), mismatch page names from sitemap, etc. Site slipped to page 4/5. I righted things, fixed duplication using canonicalization, made some other changes. Now site is gone completely from Google/Bing for desired keyword. No penalties. Site still shows if do search on domain name. Site is www.plussizeplum.com (plus size lingerie, sorry), keyword target is plus size lingerie. Anyone have any clues, tips, etc on why we fell off the face of the earth? Page Authority/Domain Authority are both comparable to most of the page 1/2 sites for same thing. Thanks for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlcohen0