Google snippet - my menu+meta tag? - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

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Google snippet - my menu+meta tag?

wheel

9:45 pm on Aug 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

Huh?

I googled a search term today and my site description in Google is a mishmash of my main nav menu and my meta description. A total nonclickable mess. Like:

Home Widget A Widget B ...{start of my meta description, but not all of it, it's truncated}

It's even got the ... in there.

What the heck? Can I stop this somehow?

tedster

4:50 am on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

wheel

11:25 am on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

What does that do? give me no snippet at all?

rainborick

12:31 pm on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

Yes, "nosnippet" prevents Google from displaying a snippet, the "cached" link, and the page preview link. But the first thing that occurred to me when I saw your post was that the problem looked like it might be an HTML error on the page that was confusing Googlebot. You might want to run that page through a validator just to be sure.

wheel

12:41 pm on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

Well, they've been doing fine until now. The site has been online with a decent snippet for 4-5 months. This just started yesterday - so it's something on Google's end that changed,not me (I considered the HTML possibility as well).

I do have two menus, one along the top that they're drawing the snippet from, and one down the side. Perhaps that's causing an issue. Still, why they would grab text from inside a series of anchor tags is beyond me.

pageoneresults

1:50 pm on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

Still, why they would grab text from inside a series of anchor tags is beyond me.

Do you have a META Description for that page?

I know you know that Google will generate snippets based on the user's query.

If anyone is having issues like this with their snippets, you do have some level of control. First and foremost is a META Description that is written very carefully for the page. If the META Description best represents the meaning of the page, I've found that Google will use that and not mess with generating snippets on the fly.

I do know from experience that if the first lines of code after the <body> element are nothing but navigation and/or repeating static content, and there is a lot of it, there's a good chance you'll get the mish mash snippet you refer to.

wheel

2:07 pm on Aug 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

I do know from experience that if the first lines of code after the <body> element are nothing but navigation and/or repeating static content, and there is a lot of it, there's a good chance you'll get the mish mash snippet you refer to.

Aaaaah. Thank you very much P1R. That's exactly what's going on :).