Google showing no meta descriptions at all (UK)

[superclown2]

I'm in the UK and I can't see any meta descriptions at all. It makes the search results pretty difficult to assess at first glance. Anyone else seeing this?

[tedster]

Do you mean you are seeing an entire set of search results that are title only - with no snippet beneath any of them?

[superclown2]

No, the snippets are there, what was missing was the meta description tags. I've now found a few but the majority of them on a large number of sites than I'm tracking are no longer visible.

[tedster]

So is this what you're saying? That in many cases. Google is choosing their own snippet rather than the page's meta description? If so, that's been going on to one degree or another for more than a year - they even create their own title if their algorithm predicts that the page's own title wouldn't get good click-through.

Or am I still not getting it?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I just checked the UK Google(google.co.uk/ncr) and see a lot of results using Google created descriptions, not the site provided descriptions from meta tags. 8/10 and 7/10 in the two searches I just did do not use site meta data.

I'm not surprised really, Google does not seem to want to use anything a webmaster provides as a ranking criteria and the description meta may very well go the way of the keyword meta.

[nickreynolds]

Most of my UK searches are showing the meta description but a few are not

[piatkow]

Two searches for my site with slightly different keywords:
1. Description from DMOZ
2. My description

[superclown2]

So is this what you're saying? That in many cases. Google is choosing their own snippet rather than the page's meta description? If so, that's been going on to one degree or another for more than a year - they even create their own title if their algorithm predicts that the page's own title wouldn't get good click-through.

Sure, but over here, in the past, they showed the meta description more often than not if it was relevant to the search term. What I am seeing now is the opposite - if the meta description contains the search term it is more likely than not to be ignored. If it shows a synonym of the search term it is more likely to be displayed. In the cases I've looked at, where the meta description is missing the title contains the search term too, so that may be the bit they don't like. So perhaps we should use the target search term in the title and a synonym in the meta description tag. Unless of course this is just some experiment which will return to normality eventually - I hope so, it is certainly making the results less easy to navigate, for me at least.

[tedster]

Thanks for the clarification, superclown. Well - meta descriptions have not been a ranking factor for a good while. But this kind of shift, even if it's only an experiment, sure can be unnerving. A lot of responsible webmasters put a lot of thought into crafting good meta descriptions. Having them thrown away and replaced by some machine-"intelligence" is a bit, well... almost insulting.

[piatkow]

Are people seeing third party descriptions other than one in DMOZ (or in sites cloned from DMOZ)?

[enigma1]

it is certainly making the results less easy to navigate, for me at least.

Why is less easy to navigate? When you enter the keywords google returns the surrounding text whenever possible for the keywords searched.

So it won't display necessarily the meta-description if the searched keywords aren't part of it. But it's better as it is because it contains at least a surrounding paragraph so the user doesn't need to click the link if the paragraph looks irrelevant with what he seeks.

[g1smd]

I'm leaning more and more towards having the URL descibing exactly what the page is about.

Google will always show the URL of the page you're about to visit, won't they?