Site description on Google has changed to a very outdated description
-
When I googled my top keyword today, my site on google showed a description of my site from YEARS ago. It is completely irrevelant and misleading to visitors.
Why would this have happened and is there anything I can do about it?
Thanks!!!
Betsy
-
In general, I would suggest using the below tag to prevent the use of ODP and Yahoo directories:
-
Interesting. Would you recommend that most people add that meta?
-
Thank you! That was the issue. I found that I could modify the description within DMOZ.
-
Google may be taking the description from your DMOZ listing (if you have one). If this is the case, it's an easy fix - just add the following to your
-
Google offers a description they feel would be the most beneficial for users. They can use information from any of several sources which include:
-
text (hidden or not) from anywhere on the page
-
your meta description
-
your directory descriptions
If you can share the keyworld, URL and Google type (.com, .co.uk, etc) you used so we can duplicate the result, I can locate the source of description.
I have never seen a case where Google generates a description based on data that is not presently available. I believe the information is currently on or associated with your page, but perhaps you are not seeing 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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
How do you link your adaptive mobile site to Google Analytics?
With Google now saying they're putting a lot more emphasis on mobile sites, we recently got notifications from Google Webmaster Tools saying that some of our pages are not built for mobile. Some of these pages, however have an adaptive page that when you visit from a mobile phone (m.mysite.com), you're taken to instead of the desktop version. My question is, how do I let Google know that I have an adaptive site and not get penalized for poor mobile usability? I already have Google Analytics on the mobile site, I just need to somehow let Webmaster tools / Google's web crawlers know that they should be looking to my mobile site for usability, not the desktop site. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Redirect 301 issue. I changed my domain name and Google is killing me.
Hello SEO community: I have this problem, and I don't know exactly what to do. I recently changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com uclasificados.net was a free classified ads for USA in spanish, and was my most affortable site, so I wanted to convert it to .com because I thought it could get more popular with the .com domain. uclasificados.com was before a free classified ads website for Colombia, but was not very popular and had poor traffic so I moved the Colombian content to uclasificados.co. Since I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com I have lost a lot of ranking, and l my traffic every day is getting lower. I have already checked the 301 redirections and they are working correctly, but even thought I keep getting less traffic and less money. I have also checked with moz tools both sites link juice, and it says that uclasificados.net have better reputation. So I was wondering if I change it back and redirect uclasificados.com to uclasificados.net but I worrie that if I do that, maybe I can make things worse. What do you recommend me?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 -
Can view pages of site, but Google & SEOmoz return 404
I can visit and view every page of a site (can also see source code), but Google, SEOmoz and others say anything other than home page is a 404 and Google won't index the sub-pages. I have check robots.txt and HTAccess and can't find anything wrong. Is this a DNS or server setting problem? Any ideas? Thanks, Fitz
Technical SEO | | FitzSWC0 -
Best Google Practice for Hacked SIte: Shift Servers/IP or Disavow?
Hi - Over the past few months, I've identified multiple sites which are linking into my site and creating fake pages (below is an example and there's over 500K+ of similar links from various sites}. I've attempted to contact the hosting companies, etc. with little success. Was wondering if my best course of action might be at this point: A) which servers (or IP address). B) Use the Google Disavow tool? C) both. example: { http://aryafar.com/crossings/200-krsn-team-part19.html } Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | hhdentist0 -
What steps can you take to help a site that does not change
Hi, i am working on a product and services website www.clairehegarty.co.uk but the problem i have is, the site does not really change. The home page stays the same and the only time it changes is when a new course is advertised. The most important page on the website is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy but we have seen the site drop in rankings because the page is not being updated. This page has all the information you could want on weight loss but we have seen the page drop from number one in google to number four. I would like to know what steps we should take to increase our rankings in google and would be grateful for your suggestions. If i put in articles on the site, had a section where we put a new article every week, would this then get google to visit the whole site more and move our pages back up the rankings, or should we be looking at doing other things.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0 -
Google +1 Button on Flash sites
One of my customers is willing to add Google +1 button on their Flash websites. Is it possible? How can we add Google +1 button on a Flash site? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | merkal20050