Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've known for some time that if the description is less than 50 characters, then Google will append text from the page to Google description in the search results. (In my experience)
I also know that they'll use the dmoz description.
Tonight, I noticed for a long tail keyword result I'm ranking for on this site, they didn't do the meta description + page text I'm used to. They actually used none of my meta description and used only page text. The page text was actually better than my meta description, so I'm not complaining, but I've never seen this before...
Is this new? This particular site does not have a dmoz listing, so they couldn't resort to it.
I've known for some time that if the description is less than 50 characters, then Google will append text from the page to Google description in the search results. (In my experience)
Hmm...
We have META descriptions of all kinds of lengths, but this i've never experienced.
However...
The snippets for the page are different based on what you made the search for. If the keywords can be found in the meta description, that will be shown. If it's in the text, excerpt(s) of the content will be shown... i even noticed for one of our pages that has the relevant phrase ONLY in an image alt tag, that when i do a query on that term, the snippet is taken from ( surprise ) the alt tags ( notice tagS ) of the page, clipped together.
There is no single version of the snippets.
Descriptions ( meta or dmoz ) are only your generic message towards G what you'd like to see. However if the keyphrase the search was made for is only found in the page body... er... see above :)
At least these are our own experiences.
The reason being, if I put a meta descrip in the overallheader it would then have the same description for all pages in the forum.
So I choose to make the title <title>Site Name (forum topic variable)</title>
This makes each page's title different. Since there is no meta descrip., google grabs the first snippet of text it finds. I noticed that the discussions were showing wierd descriptions though, things like Author: somename Date Posted: somedate Views: 3423 and so on. This was not very descriptive.
However with some page tweaking I got the body of the message to appear first in the table, now the descriptions are the first paragraph of the post. After looking over them all with the site: command I must say I am very pleased with the descriptions, and the site is getting quite a bit of traffic since this change.
If the keywords can be found in the meta description, that will be shown. If it's in the text, excerpt(s) of the content will be shown...
Makes since to me... Guess this is just the first time I paid attention enough to actually see them not use my meta description at all for my site.
As for the less than 50 character thing, I see it easiest with the site command. I do the site search and Google will show only the meta description if it is over 50 characters, if not, then it will show the meta description and a snippet of the first text on the page. It also does it for my keyword searches, but as you pointed out, it uses more relevant page text, not just the first text it sees.
On this particular site, I've started rewriting the meta descriptions that are too short and I've confirmed, that once I write it to be longer than 50 characters, Google uses it only. Or at least I thought, until I saw it using none of the meta description last night.
Another way to check this is do a search for something. If you see a short Google description, it will still be over 50 characters. You probably won't find any shorter than 50 characters, unless it's no description at all.
[edited by: Jordo_needs_a_drink at 6:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2006]
