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 -
I changed my home title and meta description but on google, i still see the old title and meta description. Whats the problem here?
I basically changed the title and meta description of my homepage and when i search on google, it still shows old. Whats the issue?
Search Behavior | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
Homepage & Subdomain Love Story...
Hi, Here's the situation: There's this website URL.com which is a search engine for a certain purpose (android developers). In fact, the homepage and maybe the "about" page are the only pages sitting on URL.com, all of the other inner pages (hundreds of thousands) are generated within one main Sub-Domain - X.URL.com Also, the analytics is tracking only X.URL.com because those inner pages are the only ones to attract organic traffic. So, in Analytics we see URL.com as referral traffic to X.URL.com Also, in WebmasterTools under "Links to your site" we see like half a million links from URL.com to X.URL.com Is this situation normal, do you think it may impact SEO in any way? Last remark, organic traffic is growing in a great way to the inner pages generated by the search engine, which as said sitting under x.URL.com Thanks
Search Behavior | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
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 -
Have Google changed something in Analytics
Hi Mozzers, I have a client that gets loads of traffic and since the 15th February there has been a decrease in New Visitors and an Increse in Returning. Traffic levels are the same. The returning is up and new are down by a long long shot. Have Google changed the way these visits are calculated? I can't see anything on the blog - anyone experiencing similar issues Bush
Search Behavior | | Bush_JSM0 -
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 -
Changing Site Structure Drastically
Howdy Guys, We are in the process of changing our sites structure dramatically, at the moment this is how an internal page / URL reads: Www.mydomainname.co.uk/ww.sys/pagename We will he changing our site over to wordpress very shortly and will have the correct permalinks in place. We are scared it's going to hurt our rankings as we are in the top 6 for a highly competitive keyword at the moment - the bouns is our domain name is 11yrs old and we have a PR of 4. We have setup all the 301s in web.configuration file just wondering if any of you have made a dramatic change like this and been dropped off the rankings.....
Search Behavior | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Homepage redirect dilemma, need some advice!
Our site is built to show users things to do around their current location. For this reason we redirect users to a city specific home page based on their location. To do this we detect users IP address and 302 redirect them to the closest city with events. Our site is below and you should be able to see the 302 redirect. fyifly.com My concern is that I always here not to use 302 redirects as they don't pass link juice through. I don't think 301 redirect would be good either as it is not a permanent redirect. Any advice on how you think the best way to treat this would be great or if you think the 302 direct is the best solution.
Search Behavior | | lsujoe0