Google not pulling correct Meta Description
-
For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.
Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?
-
If you have an H2 on your page, maybe try to include same or highly similar wording in your meta description and try to avoid any sentences where relevant words to that page (or synonyms of such words) are not found on your page. I have tried with my own site in past and it has worked. No statistical evidence beyond what worked for my own site, but consider giving it a shot.
-
http://www.dmoz.org/ -> It's Open Directory Project, maintained by a community of volunteer editors, basically is directory trusted by the Search engines and many times the description from dmoz is used as snippet in the search results. When you submit a site for dmoz a human will verify and will accept your site only if it follow the guide lines.
Google can still display their own snippet but I think is worthy a try....
-
Sadly, Google often puts in their own snippet for the meta description, and will even change the meta titles on you too, depending on your query. There's often not a whole lot you can do about it, except take comfort that it happens even to sites like apple.com.
-
Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.
-
If Google Understand that your meta description is not as relevant to your page content or search query, they will replace with the content from your page that they understand as more relevant, To solve the issue you can try get list Dmoz, often search engine pull their description from dmoz or rewrite your meta description.
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
-
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Google Six Pack Meta Descriptions
Anyone know of some good resources on the way to control the meta descriptions in the Google six pack for a branded search. Google appears to often bypass the meta description and pull random text from the page. We have tested this by adding the brand name to the meta description and this appears to help but doesn't always sort the issue. You often get the same results with the site comand. It not really an SEO issue more a branding one. Anyone get any ideas or resources they can point me at?
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Duplicate Meta Titles and Descriptions Issue in Google Webmaster Tool
Hello All, We have one site named http://www.bargains-online.com.au/ & have some categories along with filter option on left side like filter by price & by brand, ect. We have already set rel canonical tags on all filtered pages, but still those all pages showing duplicate page titles and description warning in HTML Improvements section in Google Webmaster Tool. For Example: http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners.html We've set rel canonical tag on below pages. http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/manufacturer:black-eagle.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:2,100.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:3,100.html Kindly request if anybody has any solutions for the same, please share with us. Thanks, Akshay
Technical SEO | | akshaydesai0 -
Commas in Meta Title and Description Okay?
Hey there guys, have heard some recent information from some experts that utilizing commas in headings, meta titles or descriptions is not good for ranking. Can you guys please shed some light on this? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MrGlobalization0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Homepage no longer indexed in Google
Have been working on a site and the hompage has recently vanished from Google. I submit the site to Google webmaster tools a couple of days ago and checked today and the homepage has vanished. There are no no follow tags, and no robots.txt stopping the page from being crawled. It's a bit of a worry, the site is http://www.beyondthedeal.com
Technical SEO | | tonysandwich
Any insights would be massively appreciated! Thanks.0 -
How to disallow google and roger?
Hey Guys and girls, i have a question, i want to disallow all robots from accessing a certain root link: Get rid of bots User-agent: * Disallow: /index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=tellafriend%26productId=* Will this make the bots not to access any web link that has the prefix you see before the asterisk? And at least google and roger will get away by reading "user-agent: *"? I know this isn't the standard proceedure but if it works for google and seomoz bot we are good.
Technical SEO | | iFix0