What happened to My website Meta description?

[bondhoward]

What happened to My website Meta description?

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! Monica is correct in that Google will pick snippets out of content when they feel it is more relevant to the search query than your meta description. In this case, you don't have any header tags, and I'm not sure where "teaser" is coming from, exactly, as you do not have any crawlable text on your home page. If you read the documentation Ryan linked too, though, it will confirm that Google can pull descriptions from many different sources, including references to it elsewhere on the web.

What I would do is thoroughly read the documentation Ryan linked to, and work on optimizing both your title tag and meta description according to Google's recommendations. Think about what would be most helpful to someone searching for your brand in the search engines.

Along those same lines, you may also want to consider using a different coming soon plugin, beefing up your placeholder content, and collecting email addresses for people interested in receiving an email when the new site launches — which could include a coupon, etc.

The plugin you are currently using is for new websites (not established sites temporarily down for a redesign), its text is not crawlable, and the content (displayed in a single image) is not very useful for human visitors, either. If this is an established site, I'd recommend looking into the Coming Soon Pro Plugin by SeedProd, which is more SEO friendly (including crawlable text) and reading up on the difference between its coming soon and maintenance modes.

Hope that helps!
Christy

[RyanPurkey]

Monica's answer is correct. Here's the link to Google's own description of this behavior: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1. Worth a read!

[MonicaOConnor]

I have seen a couple of cases where an H tag shows up instead of the meta description because it matches the query better. Google will pick snippets out of content they feel is relevant to the query. Without seeing the page or the query, that is my best guess.