Google overriding meta description - retrospective?

[Bee159]

Hi all, we run a furniture store and our results in Google.co.uk almost always use the page's content as the description in the search results, even though we have a correctly implemented meta description tag.

The rival's pages that rank above and below us almost always show the ranking page's meta description in Google's results page.

Our developer seems to think it's because we added the meta description tags long after the pages were first indexed by Google and he seems to think Google has "fixed" on the page content and is happy with that over our meta description ...but I've never heard of that before.

Thank you.

[TimHolmes]

Unfortunately, this does sometimes happen when Google tries to establish what it feels is the best and more relevant description of the page thus overriding your meta description.. You may find it pulls from your opening paragraph or elsewhere.

I would suggest looking to st re-indexing your changes - maybe resubmit your site via webmastertools (Google Search Console) )for a recrawl.

Also and this may not be the case, but if you have a listinf on Yahoo or the OpenDirectory/DMoz, sometimes content can be pulled in from there to replace your descriptions.  Maybe look to add the following meta tag to remove this issue.

[BlueCorona]

Hi Ben!

Google should be seeing/indexing any of the changes that you make your your website, no matter when you originally published the page. While at SMX this year, one of the speakers talked about making the meta description LONGER than the recommended 160 characters. This will give Google more to choose from when selecting the best meta description for the page, instead of just randomly selecting content from any part of the page. I have not tested this method, but could be something interesting to try if you haven't had luck with anything else!

Good luck!