Musicarl - 9:40 pm on Jul 17, 2008 (gmt 0)

We run interviews on one of our sites, and a few months ago changed the meta descriptions to make them more, well, descriptive. I think it made things worse in the rankings. To compare:

First version:
meta name="Description" content="Interviews: Subject Name."

Second version:
meta name="Description" content="Experts discuss the expertness, Interviews: Subject Name."

A Google search for interviews in the first version gets better results, and displays on the search page the first question and part of the answer under the link, which is pretty compelling.

For the second version, the search results are poor, and this is displayed on the search page under the link:
"Experts discuss the expertness, Interviews: Subject Name. Some stuff from the bottom of the page like Share this interview: Delicious · Digg"

Maybe it's our syntax, but it looks like in this case the more detailed description is hurting our results.