Google is not honoring my descriptions
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I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants. This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages. An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view
SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ...
Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both.
I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly. What can I do to fix this?
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They had switched the title months back but once I shortened the pixel width it righted itself. Thanks for the answers it is much appreciated!
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Could be, if user's expects one thing and gets another bounces will increase (as you know). So did Google switch the page title as well? If so here's a good post on why.
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I have a few keywords in there. What led me down this path was an insane drop off rate that I noticed for that page. We have an 89.2% drop off from that page as a landing page when I'm looking at our behavior flow report. I decided to check the SERP's to see if anything stood out, to me, the description that google has used when you search "SQL Sentry Plan Explorer" seems misleading. It looks like you are going to get to a blog post from one of our MVP's and you would in fact be going to a product sales page. I was wondering if that could account for the drop off.
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Generally, if someone queries a keyword and if that kw is not in the meta description and the page is relevant, Google may return a snippet or two of a site's content that contains that kw. They believe it to be more useful to the user. So you could try to optimize phrases that contain that keyword to increase clicks.
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I do not believe it is pulling it from a rich snippet. I do however see a different result depending on how I search for the keywords for that page. That is really strange. Doesn't seem like there is much I can do about this one.
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Google will show what they believe will help the searcher the most. So based on the query, the meta description may or may not show.
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Some times google just does this, but there are techniques you can use to try to force them to accept your description (keyword "try"). A number of them are listed in an older Moz post, here. It has some good info on schema and snippets which might help you, and some more references that can guide you in that direction.
Good luck,
Ruben
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