PHP, G, and the no "snippet" oddity.

[glengara]

A number of PHP based sites have the same title and meta description on all the pages returned by Google in a "pages from this site" search.

The title thing I can understand, but these pages all have G indexed text, and I'd expect at least some to show a snippet rather than the meta description.

One site in particular is quite odd, as the "no snippet" thing is restricted to the /store/customer/product.php?productid= pages rather than the entire site.

So could this be down to a particular type of PHP set-up?

[ergophobe]

I would guess it's down to an inflexible template that just gives the same description for all pages sharing that template. Remember, Google doesn't know and doesn't care what tool - PHP, PERL, C, Ruby, Dreamweaver, Notepad - is used to generate your HTML. It just reads what you send it.

[glengara]

*I would guess it's down to an inflexible template that just gives the same description for all pages sharing that template.*

I suspect that's the case too, and would explain the title, but not why there's not a single snippet from a 500 page site with available text, IMO.

Not being at all familiar with CMS/DBs/PHP, I thought I'd better ask you guys if it could be a PHP thing ;-)

[ergophobe]

I wonder. If you turn off cookies and browse the site, what happens? I wonder if it has to do with the site incorporating session information and it keeps giving Google a default text for pages that require a session. That's another possibility unless it's just plain cloaking/spamming

[glengara]

Well I surf cookie and JS disabled, the "live" and the cached pages are identical.

I tried a text snippet from a page in a "" search on G, and the page is returned, so G has indexed the text.

But why in every case it prefers to show the meta description rather than a snippet, remains a mystery :-(

SteveB over at the G forum said that G is "experimenting" in how it's listing sites.

I could understand a mixture of snippets and meta descriptions, but unless there's something specific to these sites, the "description only" doesn't add up.