Text in SERPS doesn't appear on the destination page

[myrrh]

I have many times come across the situation where a word or phrase I'm searching for on Google that appears in the search results does not appear on the page the result links to.

Very frustrating. Does anyone know why this happens and how to find the actual text referred to in the search results?

[wilderness]

Could be in page description, alt text, CSS, remark or even hidden text.

Could simply be that a newer page is on the active website and goggle has not added the update.

[tedster]

It can also be in backlink anchor test, or the backlinked page's Title, or even a 301 redirected domain that used to rank for the word. Clicking on "cache" can give you information about that.

I also find that pages with show/hide div expansions are increasingly causing me frustration. If I haven't revealed the hidden content, then a browser "find on page" search fails, even when the keyowrd is in the source code.

[Receptional Andy]

The most common reason I've seen for this is a simple discrepancy between Google's index and the cache - there are often indexed words associated with a page which are not available to Google's cache highlighting function. An example is text that has been removed from pages (sometimes months ago) but is still associated with the URL.

In those instances, there is no possible way for you to find the keywords in the cache, or on the page itself.

[CWebguy]

meta tags

[Robert Charlton]

meta tags

Not likely. See this thread, which quickly goes into the question of whether the meta keywords tag will affect your rankings....

Are repeated meta keywords duplicate content?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Inbound link anchor text is a much more likely factor.

[skweb]

Let us say I create a page about comfortable shoes but then someone links to the page using the anchor text footwear or sandals, then even though I never used these two terms in the article, it may still show up in searches for these two words.

In addition to that, alt text on images that does not show up on a page unless you put your mouse on the photo, can also lead to a search result.

[ZydoSEO]

Our home page ranks for hundreds if not thousands of keyword phrases that don't appear on the page. It's all due to inbound links from other sites linking to us with those keywords as the link text.

I could make your page rank for "cotton candy" simply by buying a bunch of links on cotton candy related sites and linking to your page with the link text "cotton candy".

Happens all the time...