Link text works great for serps

But now my description needs work

[Powdork]

Maybe this belongs in an "If I were Google" thread. With the current value of link text that seems to be where a lot of the keywords are being found by Gbot. The problem with this is that then nav bars and site maps end up becoming your description. At some times they are showing up even when the search term comes up in <h1> text. Wouldn't it be easy (for someone who knew what they were doing, not me) to add something to the algo which would not return a description containing a certain number of links or surrounded by a certain number of links. Instead, when this threshhold is passed Google could default to the dmoz description (or even the meta description). Not would this make the web a happier place but it would help me :).

I'm happy to report that this embarrassing occurrence on my site can be seen (today, anyway) in the #1 position for many of my keywords. Thanks to everyone for all the help.
Cut

[brotherhood of LAN]

There are a few ways to "manipulate" this

btw your link on the other thread worked ;)

Many people here will recommend using CSS for absolute positioning, so you can put your content at the top of the page.

This made my SERP's look a bit better anyway ...... absolute positioning can allow you to put your "meaty" content at the top, which hopefully contain all the nice keywords you want highlighted in a SERP

[Powdork]

Yes, I do that on my own sites and I've even written several threads on how to do it with Dreamweaver but I'm working with a client who has everything set up in tables and I've only been hired for the optomisation part of it. It just seems like it would be an easy fix for google since they already use all of the info needed.

[kurky]

Powdork: Sorry but I'm a newish here and have tried to find the threads which you mentionned you'd written with the site search but to no avail. Could you possibly post a link as I can't find them and have gone through quite a lot of pages looking. Thanks :)

[Powdork]

Sorry, they weren't here. They were over at Google.macromedia.dreamweaver and somewhere else.

Basically if your in wysiwyg mode:

1. Highlight the layer by clicking on it. The asssociated tag will also be highlighted.

2. Now that you know where the tag is drag it further down the page (if you want it to show up less frequently in results descriptions). Gbody reads in english (left to right, top to bottom on the Dreamweaver wysisyg screen and in code as well I guess) so if all your tags are aligned across the top move them further to the right to get them to show up less often.

3. You can do the same thing in code by highlighting everything in the code starting with <div ID and ending with </div> (inclusive) and drag it to the part of the page according to its relevance.

4. Be careful where you drop it if your new to code.

Hope that was what you were looking for.

[martinibuster]

It's a funny phenomenon, and quite frustrating to find a cryptic mix of navigational and miscellaneous text popping up in the serp description. This was on a new page no bigger than 20k.

Sometimes, a cause of this is from a partial spidering. This happened to me, and was obvious from the cache that the results were from a partial spidering as only half my index page was showing.

Now this one may not be related to your case at all, although your apostrophe problem might lead one to suspect that it may: I've seen a similar phenomenon where the html has lots of errors (Like missing quotation marks, i.e. align=left, a badly formatted call for external css, that sort of thing).

When I spidered this badly written site for html to text ratio, I discovered an absurdly high score that was way out of line with reality. What this told me was that the bad html, in this particular case, was causing the spider to parse the html itself as text.

The site ranked nowhere. In fact, when you do a search on the dotcom name, the only description returned is the title tag and two random words!