Problems with Google results

[SilbertAd]

Hi Everybody,

I ve been dealing with this issue for a while now. i have a multilingual website: www.vallnord.com

When a search for Vallnord in Google it always shows the result in Catalan, but it does not show what I specified in the meta description, it displays what it crawls from the home page.

I have 2 problems here:

1. It is not showing my meta description. What can I do?

2. It is not showing the language from which the search was made. Example: if you search from Google.com and your default language is english it should been displayed the result from the english HTML. www.vallnord.com/en but it is not like this. It is always the catalan (default language of the site) the one that is displayed.

I have tried several things already:

1. Inserting the Hreflang function

2. Changing the descriptions

3. Resubmitting the sitemap via Google Webmaster

I can not figure out what is going on because if you search: "Vallnord Castellano" it will display the spanish URL but still not the proper description.

Moreover if you search: "www.vallnord.com/es" on google , it will display the proper URL and description.

FYI, I am using 301 redirects for the languages: es.vallnord.com it is the sames as www.vallnord.com/es

In addition to this, If using Yahoo search engine there is no problem. it will show the proper language. from yahoo.com the first result is in english and from yahoo.es the first result Spanish.

So any idea what would be the problem?And furthermore, any Idea which would be the solution?

Thanks in advance,

Guido.

[gfiorelli1]

Mmm...

if I search "Vallnord" in Google.com, I see as first result http://www.vallnord.com/en and the description snippet is actually its meta description tag.

As second result I've the .com (the catalan version). In this case the meta description is generated by Google itself as the original one is everything but a description:

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Arcalís | Arinsal | Pal. Andorra</a>" /> 

In the case of the spanish version, it doesn't appear in the google.es SERPs when I search both for Vallnord and Vallnord castellano. You have to click on "more results from Vallnord to see it.

In this case, I suppose it is due to the fact the catalan is a language that you cannot geotarget as you can do with spanish or english, for instance (I'm not going to enter in "nationalism" issues :D).

That means that it appears in any Googles, also the spanish one. And having the .com a stronger link profile than the spanish one, it appears in the spanish SERPs.

The reason why your meta description doesn't appear when you do a search for "Vallnord" is quite simple, imho: the word Vallnord it's not present at all in the meta description, therefore Google compose the snippet assembling phrases of your home page where Vallnord is present.

[SilbertAd]

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for your email.

Yannick answer did not solve my problem. Do you have any better solution? How can I tell Google to read my description?

Does this take a lot of time? or should it be changed immediately?

Thanks,

Guido.

[gfiorelli1]

Hola Guide, did the Yannick answers helped you solving the issue, especially the 2nd one? I say so, because I still see Google choosing to show a description other than yours in the SERPs. A description which is taken directly from the home page content (surely because it thinks it better respond to the queries done by the users).

[YannickVeys]

Ah yes, didnt see the meta langauge tag. Sorry about that. Try the links approach. Takes more time, but works.

Your meta description is very short. Try to get close to (but not more then) 160 - 165 chars and see what happens.

[SilbertAd]

Hi Yannick,

Thanks for your answer.

1. My descriptions are about skiing, so the content is relevant on one hand. In the other hand it is not showing DMOZ description. So i do not understand why google is not respecting my meta description.

2. I need to tell Google all the different languages urls have the same content. that is what I was trying to do with the hreflang. but it did not work.

That tag is already inserted

regard,

G.

[YannickVeys]

1. Their might be a mismatch between what is in your meta description and what content there is on your site. If you talk about french fries in your description, but it's not in the content of your site. Google will more often choose a snippoet from your site. Second thing that could happen is that if you are listed in DMOZ, Google sometimes takes the description given there, to be your desciption in the search engines.

2. Try <meta http-equiv="language" content="EN">

But number 2 is not so easy. If you get a lot of links to your homepage, google will just decide that the .com url is more relevant to users than the /en/ version when ppl search for vallnord. So getting more link with Vallnord as <a>to the /en/ version might help with that problem.</a>