Google showing my content on the serps in a different domain

[Paessler]

Hi all,

Recently a partner of ours discovered that Google is showing a meta description on the serps for his homepage that is not his but ours. On his site, he sells add-ons for our software, so the name of our software appears many times and as well there are many links pointing to our site.

He claims he hasn´t copied this text from us, and I have used some tools to verify this. I don´t understand how Google can get confused and show our text as the meta desctiption on the serps for his homepage.

Any idea on why this happened?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey there

So Chris is right, this isn't always the meta description showing, but often snippets of text based upon what the searcher typed. But Google is getting the text from somewhere on the partner's website.

One thing you should do is check Google's text only cache - type cache:www.domain.com/url-name (adding cache: in front will give you Google's cache - and then click "text-only" in the top right. Search for the text in question there. It's possible either the content is "hidden" somehow but crawled, or maybe it used to be there, and it's still in Google's cache even thought the current page is different.

[Chris.Menke]

A couple of things come to mind Paessier:

Firstly, what shows up in the search results is a "snippet", which is usually composed of the title tag, along with some or all of the description meta tag, and/or some copy from the body of the page. Additionally, the snippet for a page can change based on the search query, so it's pretty difficult for two pages on different domains to share the exact same snippet (but not necessarily impossible). You can easily tell if the two pages you speak of have the exact same meta description by looking at their source code, which it sounds like you may have already done.  If the meta descriptions are not the same, the titles are not the same, and the copy on the two pages is not the same, yet the snippet for both pages in the results for the same search query is the same, then I'd say it's a freaky coincidence that Google happened to slice together the same snippet for two different pages with different meta data and different copy.