Meta Description VS Rich Snippets

[socialengaged]

Hello everyone,

I have one question: there is a way to tell Google to take the meta description for the search results instead of the rich snippets?

I already read some posts here in moz, but no answer was found. In the post was said that if you have keywords in the meta google may take this information instead, but it's not like this as i have keywords in the meta tags.

The fact is that, in this way, the descriptions are not compelling at all, as they were intended to be. If it's not worth for ranking, so why google does not allow at least to have it's own website descriptions in their search results? I undestand that spam issues may be an answer, but in this way it penalizes also not spammy websites that may convert more if with a much more compelling description than the snippets. What do you think? and there is any way to fix this problem?

Thanks!
Eugenio

[Everett]

Typically if Google is choosing to show a snippet of content instead of your meta description then there is something they don't like about your meta description. For instance, it could be too short, too long, over-optimized, not formatted correctly, etc...

You can't force Google to use your meta description, but you can play around with rewriting meta tags to see if they end up liking one enough to use when someone searches for your primary keywords on that page.

Also use the No ODP tag if you aren't already.

[socialengaged]

Hello,
Thank you for reply. I highlighted some parts of the website, that's true.. I will try removing them and see if metas are taken into consideration.

But this highlighting does not apply to all pages, and for many pages the first 2 lines of the pages are instead shown within the result. I understand I cannot tell Google what to show in their results

There is no other way then to let Google take my metas more into consideration? I thought that maybe to highlight the meta description only would be a solution. But there is no way to do so unless I put the meta description within the content of each page. Do you know any other solution?

Thanks anyway, your reply really helped !

[FedeEinhorn]

Eugenio,

I don't think there's a way to tell Google what to show. However, if you are building your site in such a way that it has content markup (such as schema, microformats or using the highligh tool in WMT), you are basically telling Google that that is the best way to display the search results.

If you actually prefer to show the meta description (although it is impossible to force Google to do it), you should remove whatever markup you have in your site, then let Google just display what it wants (hopefully your meta description).

PS: the keywords tag isn't used by Google anymore, that's a useless tag you can safely removed. However, Bing said that they still use the keywords meta but it is just one of over 2000 ranking signals they use. So it's basically up to you use it /don't use it (you won't find a big site making use of the keywords meta anymore).

Hope that helped!