Very strange: META descriptions not showing

[MarcelMoz]

Hello,

Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone.

I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on.

I tested some things:

• Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page).
• Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions.

More information:

• The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it).
• Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown)
• Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those).
• Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems
• I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection.

Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
Crawl-delay: 2

May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't.

I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change.

I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
Thanks in advance.

Marcel

[Vacatia_SEO]

So I am encountering the same problem as Marcel. My meta descriptions are similar to other pages, but not exact matches. There are variables in each description that change depending on the page you are viewing. My main issue with Marcel's solution is that I don't want to put the exact meta description in the content as it doesn't really flow with the layout/design/messaging. The meta desc works on the SERPs but as an actual part of the copy, it does not fit.

Any other suggestions? Could I put the meta desc. at the bottom of the page?

Would including NOODP do the trick?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Very pleased it helped Marcel

-Andy

[MarcelMoz]

Here I am again. I tested 47 META descriptions by adding the exact description to the upper content of the page. Google has picked up 45 optimized descriptions. Problem solved, thanks again iNetSEO!

Marcel

[MarcelMoz]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your reply. I'm testing your advice. For five pages yesterday I added the exact META description to the upper content of the page. Then I fetched the pages in GWT as Google. Google has picked up the optimized META description now succesfully for four of five pages!

I am going to add more pages to this test.

Thanks, I will post the results of the new test in here.

Marcel

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Marcel,

Google are doing this more and more and one thing I find does help, is to make sure the description is very closely targeted to the page in question. Don't have key words and phrases in the description, that don't appear in the page. This has been changed by Google because they don't consider it to be focussed enough or as on-topic as it could / should be.

As a matter of course, I would also block Google from going anywhere near your ODP listing by adding

-Andy