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
-
Vanish from google after choosing preferred domain and fixing 40 duplicate meta descriptions?
I recently followed 2 Google webmaster suggestions to clean up the on page SEO for our site. I chose a preferred domain 2 weeks ago(to www.website.com) and fixed the duplicate meta descriptions that our CMS was setting to unique and more natural descriptions for each page. I did that 3 days ago. Webmaster tools still says they are duplicates because it hasn't crawled the whole site yet. We have been fortunate enough to have some of our blog posts be covered by yahoo.com, cnet.com, huffingtonpost.com, gizmodo.com, etc. That is some major backlink juice and, as recently as 2 weeks ago, our website would be the #1 result when searching Google for "ourwebsite.com exact title of very popular blog post". Now it is on the 3rd page, and the top results are the websites that linked to our blog post. So....what gives? Is there a specific area I should look at? Our should I wait for Google to fully index our whole site now that changes have been made? It should be noted that our rankings have stayed the same in yahoo and bing. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Search Behavior | | garyislearning0 -
Any Good Study on the Effects of CTR on Keyword Capitalization in SERP Description
Hey Guys I am wondering if any of you have done any study or testing on this ( or perhaps you might have come across one at some point in your career ) Personally I feel that while adding a description , it makes sense to Capitalize the Keywords and other words ( first letter only ) that I want to emphasise on ( perhaps stuff like Buy, High Quality, Best, etc ) . I want to pick your brains on this and see what you guys think about it. I have not tested the effects on CTR yet .. if someone else has then it will be a good resource for me to go through. ( and if no one else has done any relevant study I might do it at some stage ). Regards Saijo
Search Behavior | | Saijo.George0 -
Post Panda SERP placement u-turn
Last week we had three terms for a client dive out of the top 100, they all ranked against a particular page, the three terms where where core words for the clients website ... strategic to his business. I assumed that it may have been due to the latest update by Google I assumed it was due to some poor inbound links to the pages (clients re sellers) and a slight abuse of anchor tags. The terms contained one keyword and two variations, a well know software brand. We ranked as high as number two, continually fighting the actual brands main website., but none the less outranking all other re-sellers. This week we are now back ranking higher for the main term (outranking the actual brands website) and the other two are back to where they ranked. Obviously I had organised to sit down with the client tomorrow to discus. Should I bury my head in the sand, rejoice at some fortune and hope the problem is not as bad as I thought, and hope the results stay static going forward ... or is this a chance to rectify those issues I saw with more clarity after the dive bomb of the three phrases last week. Has anyone else noticed anything similar ? Offer any advice ? Cheers John
Search Behavior | | Johnny4B0 -
Why are Google ranking changes so drastic?
Hi SEOmoz community I'm sure this question has been asked numerous times before. At the same time there must be plenty of people out there wondering about the same thing: Why are Google ranking changes so drastic? It's like the diva of search engines. When checking the SEOmoz ranking reports, sometimes lots of keywords improve, the next week it's vice versa. Mind though that the ranking changes are not in proportion. While improving keywords climb up by approx. 1 - 10 positions, declining keywords always get a smack with a 15 - 25 position drop, even though these very same keywords are being targeted onsite through new content. It seems to make no difference after all 😉 Is it possible, that keyword fluctuations are stronger for younger sites? The site I am talking about is about a year old. Is it possible that more competitive keywords see more drastic fluctuations? Would be interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks!!
Search Behavior | | Hermski0 -
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 -
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