Also useful from working on the other side of trying to make traction within larger / verified news sources. Great work!
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Best posts made by RyanPurkey
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RE: Verified News Sources: A New Feature in Fresh Web Explorer Launched Today!
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RE: New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Hi John. Is the number of professions going to expand in the future? Can some be grouped in relevant clusters? It'd be pretty easy to at least link to the 28 professions from the home page so not much DA would dilute in one step. Maotly though, I'd consider content around this new site and how it's best going to interact with users.
PS: Angie's List is one that does a profession / jobs list: http://www.angieslist.com/services.htm. Since theirs is so large they alphabetize.
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RE: Duplicate Content Pages - A Few Queries..
I think this is partly due to the size of the navigation menu. If you look at it in a text browser, it's several pages of the same text and links before you get to the main page of the text. From a UX the menu is very unobtrusive and the body text is the center of focus, but a crawler is going to see the header, sidebar, and footer when calculating out the totals.
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RE: Are new pages treated similar to new domains with respect to ranking?
This is a big, "It depends," sort of question, but in general new pages are experiencing the benefits of established domains in both traffic to that domain (and thus potential new links coming from people visiting the new pages), the inherit DA of the domain that can be associated with pages on the domain, and benefits derived from other marketing channels to the domain as a whole. To keep it short, while a new domain has to establish every facet of it's authority and trust, a new page on a domain with lots of authority and trust will be established much faster. Cheers!
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RE: Moz free account
Hi Karl. Your points are separate from your Moz Pro account status so you'll still be able to keep those and ask/answer questions here. Cheers!
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RE: MozLocal Listing Results
Here's one bit from the help page (https://moz.com/local/how#faq-check
The answer to this question depends on the case, but generally speaking, your score might stop short of your goal if you are simultaneously using a service other than Moz Local to publish your listings or have not added enhanced data like photo URLs and a minimum of three relevant categories to your listings.
Check to make sure that your listing is as complete as possible and you should be on your way to moving the score up. Cheers!
Edit: Full page on Average Score here: http://moz.com/help/guides/local/local-reporting.
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RE: Google ranking by keyword for website
Hi Andrew. That would be Rank Tracker: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker. It's also incorporated into Moz Analytics if you host campaigns here. Cheers!
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RE: My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
How recently have you made these changes? Have you also utilized the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools? PA changes per OSE update, so if you ran these changes after the last update, you won't see new numbers until the next release: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (March 11th) Cheers!
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RE: Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?
Are the low quality pages necessary to the site? Or are they going to be developed at a further date? If they're not necessary to the site and always going to be low quality, it might be better to redirect them to higher quality pages. If they are necessary, then using noindex/follow is fine. The greater question is why keep them on the site if they're not necessary. Wouldn't the low quality reflect poorly on the site?
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RE: Are directory websites still worth considering?
Local directories are certainly stronger than ever with their integration into mobile, mapping results, and GPS targeted user behavior, so by all means consider using local listings wherever applicable with a client.
Directory pages on industry specific websites are also a great place for links and create topical associations and trust even if they're not keyword targeted.
General all inclusive directories have fallen by the wayside over the years as user behavior has gone less from something akin to tv-like channel surfing to targeted search and acquire usage. But like you mention in your question, and above, in the right context, directories are still strong. Just the more focused the better. Cheers!
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RE: Moz Local users: Specs for Images?
Moz uses Google + and Facebook as their baselines so having images that are scaled to the reqs in those two would be the quickest solution. With Google you can bulk upload images in the dimensional range of 1000x1000 to 3000x3000 "We recommend adding photos that are larger than 1000 x 1000 pixels and smaller than 3000 x 3000 pixels." (https://support.google.com/business/answer/6031953) and then select what you want as a cover photo within Google+. See this guideline: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4791112.
And for Facebook a profile photo containing your company's logo must measure at least 180 by 180 pixels to meet Facebook's upload requirements. Once uploaded, the photo is resized to 160 by 160 pixels and placed within a 170 by 170 field, providing a small border between your profile photo and cover photo. Photos larger than 180 by 180 pixels are scaled down to fit within the profile template. (from: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/size-facebook-business-logos-57290.html)
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RE: Is Moz going to provide mobile ranking tools?
My hunch is that Moz is going to be going after this as well since it is such a large scale change...
In the meantime you can get an idea on your mobile rankings by looking at Analytics results segmented out by mobile and organic search referrals. If the percentages align with your desktop rankings you've got a very basic correlation. You could even segment further by bringing in comparisons of top performing pages or regions that tend to deliver more mobile.
Within GWT you can also filter by mobile within the Search Traffic >> Search Queries report. Expect some changes here after the 21st as well. Cheers!
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RE: Commas in Meta Title and Description Okay?
Within titles a comma is often seen as wasted space since the character count is so limited, but sites with them in their title still rank, see: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lions%20tigers%20bears. Headings tend to be as short as titles which is probably what dictates comma usage more than anything. Meta Descriptions using commas are fine and fairly common since they're written with less space constraints as the above.
Do you have the source on where you heard this first? Would be interesting to see how they're discussing it. Cheers!
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RE: Canonicals question ref canonicals pointing to redundant urls
Right. I'd avoid using a temproary section (special offers) as a canonical in any case. It'd be better to have a temporary design element on the other hammer pages that indicate it's on sale or tag it through the shopping art so that the special offer is applied. In general, canonical should point to the page that is least likely to change and most likely to rank for the targeted search. Cheers!
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RE: 4XX client error with email address in URL
If that's what you're seeing it looks like someone used a relative href link instead of a mailto link for emails on the about us page.
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RE: Increase in pages crawled per day
Agreed. Especially since Google's own Gary Illyes respond to the following with:
How long is the delay between making it mobile friendly and it being reflected in the search results?
Illyes says “As soon as we discover it is mobile friendly, on a URL by URL basis, it will be updated.
Sounds like when you went responsive they double checked each URL to confirm. From: http://www.thesempost.com/googles-gary-illyes-qa-upcoming-mobile-ranking-signal-change/. Cheers!
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RE: Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
Just from glancing at your site, the displayed content doesn't seem to be the source of the spam. If I were you though I'd hire a trusted professional to help you purge bad links, hacker access, and rigorously check to make sure your site is clean before attempting to fix it by transferring to a new domain. You want to make certain that the new site isn't carrying any of the old baggage from the one that got in trouble and typically you can get the old one fixed in about the same time if you're disciplined about it.
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RE: Drastic changes in keyword rankings on a daily basis
This behavior can be triggered by several things, for example query deserves freshness showing a blog or news post from the site, localized search playing a factor with out the localized term, personalization like you mention, etc...
The biggest give away is that the ranking + keyword doesn't deliver anywhere near the amount of visits you'd expect for ranking consistently on the broadly seen results. It's better to think of it not as the rankings changing dramatically day to day--you'd be getting big bursts of traffic when ranking across Google for "furniture" if that were the case--instead someone that was pretty highly personalized via means outside of just there search term, used "furniture" as a search and clicked through to the site.
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RE: Analytics conversion tracking?
There are a couple options for this, and you'll have to dig a little deeper in order to find which one works for your client / third-party combination.
Some third-party ordering systems allow you to carry over tracking variables or tracking code into their system in order to measure the conversion from their software into your analytics. You'll also want to add their order system back into your analytics as a non-referral visit or else you could be seeing inflated referral numbers.
Another option is to make sure the third-party is using a confirmation page on your clients domain, that way any visit to that page is counting as a conversion (and you're not getting inflated numbers from cart abandonment).
That should give you a few options. Ideally the third party should have documentation and support on how they can best deliver conversion results. Cheers!
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RE: Is <title>different from <h1> and "meta tag title"?</title>
Hi Jason. For Volusion specifically, here's their instructions on it: http://support.volusion.com/article/setting-meta-tags-volusion-store-homepage ...
- Log in to your Admin Area and go to Marketing > SEO.
- Select Enable Search Engine Optimization Friendly URLs under the Search Engine Friendly URLs heading.
- Enter values in to the Meta Tag Title, Meta Tag Descriptions, and Meta Tag Keywords fields for the default values and any pages you want to assign specific tags to and click Save.
- Advanced users can enter their own custom meta tags by selecting Meta Tags Override and entering custom meta information into the Meta Tags Override fields for each page.
So you'll want to edit/add what they call the "Meta Tag Title" in order to clean up those errors. Cheers!
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RE: Crawl budget
If you want to test this, identify a section of your site that you can disallow via robots.txt and then measure the corresponding changes. Proceed section by section based on results. There are so many variables at play that I don't think you'll get an answer that's anywhere as precise as testing your specific situation.
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RE: Local Ranking Power of a Multi-Keyword URL?
Understood. Go to the link on Local search ranking factors to help you prioritize as that will give you the best idea of what your client is doing well, missing, or doing poorly. I'd work on all the things that are more important than localization in the URL first as improving those should gain ground the quickest.
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RE: Is real google bot like "fetch"or more like "fetch & render"?
Googlebot is behaving like the latter, "Googlebot constantly crawls and renders URLs across the entire web..." from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066467, but has the option of streamlining the process by not rendering every time. For example, if many sites are referencing the same centrally hosted code base of js, googlebot doesn't need to constantly recheck that js every time it comes across the link.
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RE: Any negative impact of addmefast.com on the website?
Here's a discussion on it in the context of YouTube's TOS: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/qN8MrLI4mHM. I'd consider it a blackhat social tactic, and one to avoid for the long term health of a business.
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RE: Facebook plugin comments and SEO
In order to make comments indexable they have to be exported via script to the page in question. Are you talking about this blog post? http://moz.com/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines. As far as I know it still applies.
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RE: Do you think ease of site navigation can play a role in ranking?
I think so in terms of whether or not it helps people engage with your site or spend more time on your site. If a difficult to navigate site is what first greets a user trying to find something specific based on the search result, the bounce back to the search results is going to drive down ranking. It will also lower the likelihood of sharing.
From a technical perspective, if a site's navigation prevents a crawler from adequately indexing a site, that could cause indexation issues which would in turn make fewer pages available for ranking. So yes, it is an element in ranking and site performance overall. Cheers!
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RE: Call Tracking numbers effect on Local SEO
Hi Frank. Here are a couple posts on this: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/, an update of: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/. That should clarify it for you. There are pros and cons obviously, but that should give you the full scope.
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RE: Wc3 validation is it still that important
If the scripting errors cause crawler and indexation problems, than they're problematic, but script errors like a lot of things have shades of gray. Some are really bad, some not as bad, and some benign.
WC3 validation is nice though as it's helping to insure the quality of the network in general.
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RE: List of categories for Google Business for the UK
If you search for very basic terms using this tool you should find quite a few relevant ones that you're looking for... http://blumenthals.com/google-lbc-categories/search.php?q=dog&val=hl-gl%3Den-UK%28PfB%29%26ottype%3D1
If you need lists to download there are several on this page: http://blumenthals.com/Google_LBC_Categories
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RE: Would it be smart to have 2 different blogs on our site?
Thumbs up. EGOL has solid advice on this. There's a lot of cross over between marketers and designers so a blog with both types of content (and talking about their intersections) wouldn't bother me in the least. Would be pretty cool in fact!
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RE: Recommended SEO Companies
Here's Moz' own list to help get you started: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/ If you'd like I can also run your site through a check list that I give to clients as a starting point. Just DM if interested. Cheers!
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RE: How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Great update Miriam. There are a lot of things site owners can add to these types of pages to help with unique content: drive time to the nearest branch from City / Neightborhood X; mobile service schedules in City / Neighborhood X; Images of service radius; highly localized testimonials, etc. Will be interesting to see the impact with franchisees..
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RE: Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hi Matt. Yes, spidering the URLs without the www. will trigger a 301 Redirect "Moved Permanently" as the site is setup to have the subdomain 'www' as default. The inbound links however also use the www. from a cursory glance, but I'm noticing that some point to aspx pages, for example: http://www.goenergylink.com/Home.aspx which now returns a 404 so it doesn't look like you used the completely same names. Further, there's no 301 Redirect in place for pointing that Home.aspx page to its new location.
The 'sitemap' here is also oddly executed: www.mckmarketingdesigns.com/sitemap/ and links like these: http://www.thecontrolrooms.com/apps/members/membersList?offset=1&q=&sort=DISPLAY_NAME&view=list with the anchor text, "Insulation Services Columbia Mo" are spammy as well.
Are you receiving warnings from GWT?
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RE: Optimizing a location the business doesn't actually reside in
When you're localizing a business within Google's own tool, they allow for this kind of feature either by selecting area codes the business serves or by applying a radius in which business will make service calls. I'd do a mix and match of phrases like, "One of Burlington's most trusted..." "serving the greater Burlington area" "calls Chittenden county home". You don't need to go over board with it though. Other local search factors are going to play a larger role.
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RE: Finding blog ideas and syndication
Hi Joshua. Sometimes it's all about finding something outside of the box when it comes to being able to create content on a regular basis. Tom Dickson probably didn't find his idea for Will it Blend? in the forums or common Q&As, still he tapped into a model that let him regularly demonstrate and solidify his brand. It also doesn't have to be solely tied to your site. If you have something that people enjoy your brand name often becomes part of the search. Just a few ideas: which couch does the dog prefer? Which couch does the cat prefer? Which lounge chair wore the throw pillow better? Etc. Cheers!
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RE: Content Rewriting and Page ranking
This would make a great split test from a UX perspective but also be a good way to slowly introduce the new content.
Just from search, If the page changes dramatically it might bounce out of the rankings briefly, but if the content topic and contextual relevance is mostly the same it should reappear. You could try introducing parts or all of the new content as an update to the top fold of the page as well, monitor rankings, then remove the parts you don't like. Several ways to test it out... cheers!
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RE: How to add meta descriptions in WordPress
There are several ways to do this depending on the theme you have installed, wordpress back end, yoast widget, and more. Here's a discussion that covers editing the home page specifically: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-change-the-meta-description-of-my-site, while here's a Yoast specific discussion: https://yoast.com/meta-descriptions/, and post about the title and meta description editor: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/#title-description.
Wordpress definitely supports meta descriptions so it's just a matter of finding where to edit them within your code.
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RE: Creating an internal link network of clients
The idea of creating links between each site could be a reasonable addition, but under the umbrella of "Sponsors" and in a duplicated format it sounds--and may appear--like paid linking.
If the clients are actively agreeing to endorse each others businesses, you could go about incorporating the links in different ways; for example, say Contractor A got a tattoo with Tattoo Shop B, linking back to Contractor A's site within his testimonial would be fine as you're connecting the sites in a way that's already been done in real life. Similarly, you could create a section on one site that's called, "Business in our neighborhood we recommend" and so on. I'd differentiate per the design and style of the business and be as true to life as possible.
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RE: Problem with getting a site to rank at all
Thumbs up that Dirk's analysis of the site speed should probably be your largest concern. I've seen several new sites really struggle to initially rank if they're in the red on those scores. 21 / 25 are really bad. Do everything you can to quickly get those in the green and you should start to appear in the rankings. This, along with Google's stance on only indexing mobile sites that have high mobility scores are two trends that aren't going away.
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RE: How worthwhile is schema markup for a local business?
As a ranking factor it's not a huge boost, but it could help with click through rates depending on the presentation of the search results. Richard Baxter did a nice study on this a couple of years back here: http://builtvisible.com/review-snippet-over-saturation-in-google-search-results/, and concluded it was a little over-played in some searches; however, beneficial in others. To better tackle this perhaps do what Richard did and look at results for some of the clients top performing words, then address the page as a whole, so instead of saying, "Hey you're number 2 for this keyword," present the page with a break down of where they appear and what happens if someone clicks on a result that's not them, but a review about them, whether or not review stars look to be a differentiating quality, if they could get into image results that would have an impact, and so on. Cheers!
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RE: Keeping SEO benefit of an old URL by changing content
Google is very good with semantically relevant information and updating posts like this with new results and further information often also provides a fresh content boost. With the volume you're talking about, I'd recommend rolling out the new content in phases so that you can see how it impacts results and decide best for your situation. Cheers!
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RE: Do Press Releases help ranking?
Hi Mase. The type of press release that gets the best benefit regarding rankings is when it's sourced via the press side. In situations like that, you have news based sites that are receiving large numbers of visits sending referrals to your site along with the associated links. The release from your side of it may be a new product, service, personal interest story, local news, business profile, etc. You'll be wanting to pitch various aspects of your site to the press for them to do the write up and publish to their network. Those are still, and will remain, really great sources of links / referrals.
The commoditized form of spun press releases across a network of press release sites is a bad route to go. Google has taken on several algorithmic changes to discount these. Cheers!
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RE: Can I have schema.org links as relative on my site? Getting an html validation error.
The error is looking for an absolute URL (including the http or https) so it doesn't look like it'll parse without it there. There's a nice discussion from a year ago at Stack Exchange on this as well, with the conclusion being, "Regarding HTTP vs. HTTPS, see also my answer to a similar (not duplicate) question: I’d recommend to always use the HTTP variant of Schema.org URIs." From: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/71857/schema-org-itemtype-identifier-should-it-use-relative-urls-or-https-links Cheers!
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RE: Kicking Ass When You Are Stuck At Position #2
Your Wikipedia comparison has worked for me. Figure out what they don't ever offer from their title tag and write against that. Another is the title tag loaded with info like, "Atlantis: Lat, Long, Current Temp, and Travel Details."
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RE: Best practices to rank a new website that does not produce much content.
How is this business different or unique when compared to its competitors? What would be the pros and cons of this business in the mind of its future customers? Is this site / business serving a highly localized clientele?
EGOL said it very well in a Q&A a while back:
If this client has "a dream" then you tell that client to... sell their baseball cards... get a second job..... borrow from their uncle... get a home equity loan.... quit their expensive habits... walk to work... do anything that they can do to "finance their dream".
If they are not willing to finance their own dream you don't want to finance it for them. If they ain't got skin in the game they ain't serious and you better take your ball and find a new game.
They should realize that "good SEO" done on a "good business" has the ability to "fund itself" after an initial investment. So, if they raise the money mentioned above them should have enough to launch it.
From this Q&A: http://moz.com/community/q/how-do-you-approach-a-client-that-is-in-a-very-competitive-market-and-doesn-t-have-the-budget-to-make-a-dent. Similar principles could apply for this business as well it seems.
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RE: Keyword Research and Planning Flow
Hi Alex. Today's webinar (http://moz.com/webinars) by Cyrus Shepard is covering this topic very well, although you're going to have to build your own workflow that works best for you. Since the webinar is going on right now (2015-02-10 10:56 Pacific Time) you'll have to wait for it to become available in the previously recorded webinar list. The title is: SEO Basics: The Fundamental Signals Used to Rank Our Content Higher
This along with the beginners guide is going to cover much of your initial steps in SEO: http://moz.com/learn/seo
As for on-page considerations, this is one of the most canonical resources: http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors. Cheers!
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RE: Suggestion: Moz Domain Authority should take disavow into account
Good take, EGOL. Regardless it'd be interesting to have a disavow tool that parses some data even based on a theoretical disavow list. I guess it'd be the opposite of the competitive link finder, i.e. you put the list of links in the tool then see how the competition and your sites DA, PA, DT, PT change based on not counting the disavowed links.
Cool initial concept Yair. Thumbs up to both of ya.
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RE: Has anyone any experience of Google pulling through random meta descriptions.
Hi Andrew. Yes, Google has been known to pull other text for its results instead of what is in the meta description. Same goes for title tags as well. Like you've inferred, what they're trying to do is match their search result with the most applicable portion of text from what they deem the most relevant page.
Edit. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624 for Google's larger explanation of this process. Cheers!
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RE: Long url links
Hi Tomek. Here's Moz's best practices: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url regarding URLs. There's an upper limit in IE of 2048 or 2083 characters so that's one consideration, but the example you provide above seems fine.