Search Results Are Displaying Old Meta Description

[Bagless]

My first post on the forum, hi to everyone and please be gentle!

I launched my first site in August 2007 and have regularly updated the title and description tags, as well as the content.

Everything was going well, with some good rankings and frequent Google Bot visits. Each crawl detected any changes I made and traffic was gradually rising.

About three weeks ago, however, I noticed that search results were displaying odd descriptions. What I mean is, the ranking on keywords had changed, but the title and descriptions reported in the results was old, and did not mirror the source code.

On further investigation, I realised the Cached page is August 2007 and it is using that tag information, which has not been on the site for maybe a year if I remember correctly.

Google Bot last stopped by on 30th July but no change.

I am losing traffic and have no idea what to do. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Bagless

[bwnbwn]

That is strange right now I suggest do nothing as it seems to be the bot or cache having issues and wait it out.

Question on your post though have you been

regularly updated the title and description tags

as this isn't recommended and can cause issues.

Is the content on the pages changing so your changing the title and descriptions or are you just doing it to make the pages looked refreshed.

I have changed my title and description on my home page maybe 10 times over 8 years.

[Bagless]

Thanks for the quick reply, at least I can wait it out knowing that there is nothing more I can do.

When I talked about the tags changing, I was trying to convey that they had altered enough times that Google should could not reporting the original ones in ordinary circumstances, probably four or five times since August 2007.

[g1smd]

That data comes from what I called a "Historical Supplemental Result" back in 2005, old data still in the system and piped out to the user under specific circumstances.

What snippet/description do you get for that URL when doing a site:domain.com search?

[Lightguy1]

I have the same thing. Its weird that google will index the page, but the meta descriptions never update.

[tedster]

The snippet is not necessarily the meta description - snippet creation is a whole separate algo, operated by a separate team at Google. It is also dependent on the specific query. Still, it does seem strange that you are seeing an antique snippet. does your revised meta description contain the search term? And is it under 160 characters but still not too short?

[edited by: tedster at 7:19 am (utc) on Aug. 9, 2008]

[Bagless]

That's interesting to here Tedster, is is something I can influence am I just stuck with the snippet that Google chooses!

[tedster]

You can infleunce it, but just to a degree, by giving the snippet algo good raw material to work with. Respond to warnings in Webmaster Tools about any problems with your descriptions.

1. Keep your meta descriptions unique from page to page.

2. They should be under 165 characters but not too short (WMT will warn).

3. Make sure they are relevant to the primary search terms that the page is targeting.

If a page also starts to rank for some secondary terms, then the snippet shown for those queries will probably be generated from content in that secondary section of the page.

[g1smd]

WMT does warn about *some* short descriptions, but I usually find that a site:domain.com search warns about a few more (by showing the first few words from the page instead of the meta description).