My Description in SERP's

why isnt it picked up?

[humpingdan]

General Google Layout of SERP's

<TITLE>
<META DESCRIPTION>
<META DESCRIPTION CONT..>
<DIRECTORY LISTING>
<URL> <PAGE SIZE>

so why when i search for a number of sites do i not get the <META DESCRIPTION> returned, instead i see what seems to be text from the site but totally ignoring the meta-tags?

what am i doing wrong?

[closed]

Does your description contain the keywords you're looking for?

[humpingdan]

yes it does, thats whats puzzleing me!

[Stefan]

Google ignores the meta tags. It uses instead a "snippet"... a section of text that has the kw's in it. Meta tags can be very spammed with keywords. It seems a sensible approach.

[onedumbear]

google does not ignore meta tags.
I still see some meta descriptions listed when they include the keywords of my search.
Google does ignore some meta's, but not all.

[Dayo_UK]

Google only tends to use Meta Description when it can not find content on the page to display. Otherwise, as per Stefan, snippets from the content are displayed.

Typically you may see Meta Descriptions in a purely Framed page with nothing between the NOFRAMES tags.

[Stefan]

Ok. All I've even seen other than snippets are directory descriptions, but I'll take your word for it. At any rate, meta tags aren't of great value to Google.

[onedumbear]

>At any rate, meta tags aren't of great value to Google.
i certainly agree with that.
I do not agree that you only see meta descriptions when the keywords are not in the body, and i double checked this just to be sure before i posted. None of the results i see meta descriptions being used for are in "framed" pages either.

[willybfriendly]

I am noticing this too with the recent update. I have one page whose snippet comes out of a paragraph 2/3rds down the page, even though there is relevant text above it.

Other pages have used the description tags, even though there is relevent content on the page.

Go figure...

WBF

[humpingdan]

This is my problem, how can i get the right text desciprtion of my page to appear under my targetted keywords in the SERP/s?

I knew google ignored meta-tags as far as the actual indexing of pages for search reasons but i thought it used them for display purposes?

PUZZLED?