Meta description of homepage, changing to latest post
-
Here's something strange I noticed. The meta description for Engadget when doing a Google search is their latest blog entry.
However, if you land on the homepage and view source the page, the meta description is a standard one for their homepage.
My first impressions : Wha? How? and Wha?
Could it be because it is a "news" site, Google goes "go on, have custom meta descriptions of your latest entry.."
Thoughts?
-
Woops, so it does. Must have mis-typed when Ctrl+F'ing
-
Hmm, see I see the meta description defined in the source
name="description" content=“Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics”/>
I know Google will generate the meta description on its own if no description is provided and Google at times will display a different meta description and titles if the data provided isn't more suitable (Experiencing this on one of my pages)
But it's strange for a defined description that relates to the homepage, this is happening.
-
Well, first of all the meta description is only a suggestion to Google of what to put in the text underneath your SERP. It's by no means an order.
Second, if you jump into the source on the Engadget homepage, it doesn't actually have any meta description code. So there's nothing there to suggest to Google what to have show up in the SERPs.
So, how does Google work out what to whack in there? Well, in the same way that sometimes Google decides what would be the best title tag for the user, it can work out what would be the best thing to display.
Currently, I'm seeing this description:
"Nokia's Q4 2012. From somewhere atop a Finnish mountain, Stephen Elop is both bellowing and whispering Nokia's fourth quarter and full-year financials."
This is the combination of the third article's image alt tag and the first line of the article on the page. With it being the third article, it is probably the last time Google crawled the page and updated it's SERP display accordingly. So, Google is pulling the alt text of the image and the first sentence of the article it has seen.
Now it's worked out nicely in this case, but it may not be so smooth for other articles. I imagine Engadget have this in mind when producing them.
If anything, shows you how useful alt text can be for images. It's not a solution for everyone and unsure what the SEO ramifications would be (wouldn't be anything too major, I'd suspect). But very interesting to see, thanks for pointing it out!
-
It is the same on the mobile section too http://www.engadget.com/topics/mobile/
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
-
Deceptive site warning from Google: Java script and meta descriptions deployed.
Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks
Search Behavior | | vtmoz0 -
How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?
I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages. I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great". My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index. Some background The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down. It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.
Search Behavior | | tosbourn0 -
Recovering from a Hack: How long until Google reindexes changes?
In a previous post I made, I was able to determine that one of my sites; http://pokeronamac.com/ was hacked and was feeding spam perscription drug content to search engines, then redirecting to another site when clicked on Google. I then contacted my web host, and, after they did a scan of our files, they determined that something within the wp-includes directory was compromised and malicious. They removed the file, though they weren't able to determine the source of the attack, or how they god in (should we be scared?). Anyway, its been several days now ~5 and if I do a site search the spam pages still show up, but the redirect is no longer working. At this point, I am at a standstill, because i'm loosing traffic on my site by about 90%, and google hasn't sent us any warnings of malaware or the like. I know I was recommended against this before, but should I attempt to submit a reconsideration request, or should I just wait it out? Thanks for your help, Zach
Search Behavior | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Should I 301 images to parent post?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress seo plug in and a few months ago I enabled the feature that redirects all images to the parent post. This month I noticed a huge drop in my organic search results for images. I just did a crawl of my site and it looks like every image does indeed have a 301 redirect on it. I'm curious what the though is on this. Should I unselect that option? I was under the impression it wouldn't make a difference with traffic and actually thought it would help since it brought people to the post instead of just the image page for that picture. Thoughts?
Search Behavior | | NoahsDad0 -
Dating Blog Posts & How Fast Google Picks up on New Pages
I had until a few months ago included the original post date of a new blog post on the site. I then removed it and none of my results in Google now include the blog post date, although for some (for articles written about events) Google includes the date of the event where you would usually see the post date. Since I did this, it seems like new blog posts are taking longer to rank on Google, some results are ranking well, and others declined relative to what I would have previously expected. What's the best thing to be doing? To include a date (considering a lot of my content is not time-relevant) or to keep it as it is now? The second thing, is I often go through and update my articles with new information and re-post it in my rss feed etc - ie the date becomes new again. How does Google treat this? Any ideas or comments would be great! Thanks
Search Behavior | | ben10001 -
Hi guys.. post-penguin my website coming in and out of serps every other day... what reason for that? ie. #11 --> #300+
We had one of the pre-penguin "unnatural links " messages in WMT - then Penguin hit April 24th/25th.. wee then set to work on Link profile... since 19th May we have had numerous search phrases come 'back' into rank pre-penguin for a day ie.. #5 - #10 and then drop the next.. ie 300+ this has been happening across a wide range of key phrases.... in fact it may well be that the key phrases are added to the serps 'briefly' or for a set amount of time... but our ranking checker checks daily so while it appears to be every other day in and out there may be another pattern... but the question is What is Google doing here and Why? any suggestions?
Search Behavior | | Geminineil1 -
Decline in engagement metrics, due to nav changes vs. content changes
With improvements in our rankings, we are seeing adverse changes in our measures of engagement. My gut reaction is to believe we are attracting more unqualified traffic, thus higher bounce rates, declines in pages/visit and time on site (approx 15%, 15%, 25%, respectively). While recent improvements in navigation might have contributed to these engagement declines, do you have any suggestions how best to determine whether these declines are due to nav changes vs. due to copy/content issues? There's been no change in copy content during this period. Thanks.
Search Behavior | | ahw0 -
Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?
Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6. Thanks
Search Behavior | | CorkyGifford0