Different serp description when logged-in vs incognito

[Storiale]

We are all well aware that SEOs should conduct our research in "Incognito Mode." While conducting research on rankings of a particular page after some A/B split testing, I realized that changes in SERPS are more than just ranking differences in Incognito mode.

While I switched off "Incognito Mode" and ran the query again, Google served the on-page content in place of my Meta Description in the SERPS.
That's right - they completely ignored my meta description and placed the manual content written about the product in addition to the fact that it was much more than 155 characters. I'm dumbfounded. Is this new or have I totally missed this "dynamic" meta description in the content having been preoccupied with other SEO related items?

I wish I could show the difference in screen captures... I'll likely update my blog and write a linkedin article about it. Either way, I feel like this is brand new or I've been staring at my monitor for too long over the past 4 months.

[lucy24]

That's right - they completely ignored my meta description

That makes it sound as if you expect them to use the meta description by default, just because it's there. My experience has been the opposite: they only resort to the meta description if, for example, the occurrences of the various search terms are so widely separated on the page that they can't fit them into a single snippet.

served the on-page content .. placed the manual content

Well, how dare they display actual, visible page content in a SERP.

Something tells me I have misunderstood.

[Andy Langton]

It's important to understand what "incognito" actually means. The main effect is that your browser doesn't supply any existing cookies, which means you appear as a "new" user to sites who have previously tracked you.

For Google, if you have been tracked, the results will be shaped to your history, which means you are unlikely to get the experience of a 'typical' user. Hence, using incognito is a good idea.

However, Google use cookies for other reasons, including setting them to test audiences when they tweak results. In addition, when you visit Google, your results will be sent from a particular dataset. You might hit different results or even a different algorithm that way.

So, this is unlikely to be anything particular about incognito. It's actually fairly expected behaviour for Google to be serving different sets of results at the same time to different users. Time was when a lot of this depended on which IP you hit when you visited Google (so you could directly access IPs to hit a specific data centre and see tests in action). Other tests need to you to have a particular cookie, and there are likely tests for 'unknown' users as well.

[buckworks]

if, for example, the occurrences of the various search terms are so widely separated

Identify what search(es) the page most commonly ranks for and ... if you can do it gracefully ... write your description so it includes those exact words or close variants.

That won't guarantee Google will use your description of choice but it will improve the odds.

The most you can hope for is a description you like on your most important searches, and not too much weirdness on lesser terms.

[clickbutt]

Google will also change the description based on the keyword used. Notice how the keyword (or keyword related) terms are in bold?
In short - Google will try and use the content that will most quickly show the searcher if your website serves his "intent".

[aakk9999]

What is interesting about the OP is that for the same search query Google changed the SERP snippet from using site's meta description to site excerpt when the user was not using incognito mode.

So it is a bit more than "Google changes snipet based on your search terms". It is "the same search terms produce a different snippet in SERPs if Google can guess your intent better from your search history and may serve a different snippet (potentially also different snippet to different people based on their search history).

I would also like to add that Google profiles/keeps search history per IP too, at least for Ads Serving purpose. If they do it for organic too, then even in "incognito" mode you may still be getting tailored SERPs "just for your IP".

BTW, welcome to WebmasterWorld, clickbutt!

[RedBar]

Google served the on-page content in place of my Meta Description in the SERPS.

That doesn't surprise me, you need to re-think how you format your on-page information.

[Storiale]

The moral of the story is that THIS IS NEW. Never did it like this before, and we check this type of thing at least 30-100 times per year... deep analysis of Title, Meta Description, Caption, Spinner Caption, etc.

[Robert Charlton]

Mod's note and continuation of discussion...

We've got two threads going on right now discussing closely related questions, a situation that I see is going to get almost impossible to manage. Though it's a difficult choice, as I explain in the other thread, I'm going to lock that thread and try to combine both discussions here. The other thread, for those who haven't seen it, is....

How to get new longer meta descriptions (>250 chars.) for our pages?
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4807134.htm [webmasterworld.com]

We'll mention some of the material covered in that thread here, but definitely give that thread a read. It introduces the news that Google is now showing descriptions roughly twice as long as the 150 character maximum length it showed previously.

Since most current pages have shorter descriptions, Google is also doing a considerable amount of rewriting and expanding of these descriptions, most likely using both relevance and personalization data when it has access to those... ie, when it's not in stealth mode.

[Robert Charlton]

Storiale posts above...

The moral of the story is that THIS IS NEW. Never did it like this before...

Well, yes and no. Google has definitely been rewriting snippets for many years, when the query and the meta description weren't sufficiently well-matched for relevance. From your description, it sounds like you were paying lots of attention to make sure that they were matched.

But, as Search Engine Journal reported during the course of this thread, the length of the descriptions/snippets in the serps has changed quite a bit, and suddenly there was no match....

Significant Change to SERPs: Google Extends Length of Titles and Descriptions
May 12, 2016
[searchenginejournal.com...]

I suspect that the increase in length has happened in part for reasons of increasing mobile click-through. The SEJ article reports...

Meta descriptions have been increased by 100 characters per line, and extended from two to three lines. That's a significant increase, and presents far more of an opportunity to tell searchers what the page is about.

As aakk9999 suggests, this observation about the difference that stealth mode makes is particularly interesting with regard to intent. Up until now, we've been attempting to match descriptions essentially for relevance. As I'd noted in this 2012 thread...

Importance of meta description
May 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4458519.htm [webmasterworld.com]

...Care should be given to crafting a page-specific description which will contain text that includes the most likely-to-rank queries, so that the description you write will be returned in the serps. Otherwise, Google will pull descriptions from a variety of sources, which might include text on your page....

Now that Google may want to return descriptions to match a searcher's intent, once we start lengthening our descriptions, I'm wondering what Google is expecting to see as a "match". We're not just talking about keyword matches any longer. It's going to be a good idea, I think, to watch what Google uses.

I'm guessing that Google might have picked this time in its evolution to try this because...
a) a longer description might be an enhancement for mobile...
b) Google has some degree of confidence that what its automated snippet generation returns can be useful...
c) and/or it wants to test the signals it's looking at.

I haven't seen enough commentary to suggest how this is rolling out... whether entire blocks of results are converted at once, or whether this is on a result-by-result basis... and also whether anyone's seen examples of long meta descriptions that have been used intact.

[piatkow]

Google has definitely been rewriting snippets for many years

I know that they sometimes used to lift descriptions from DMOZ. Do they still do that?

[Robert Charlton]

I know that they sometimes used to lift descriptions from DMOZ. Do they still do that?

I last saw this happen several years ago, and it may still be on Google's list of sources of previously vetted information about a site. See the link I posted above (about the importance of the meta description) regarding the use of the NOODP tag.

I didn't want to go too broad in this thread about that too, but using NOODP was the next thing I mentioned in that thread after the section I quoted. I always use the tag.

PS: I should say that I always use the tag for the default pages of a site that has listings in DMOZ/ODP, which usually means the home page of a listed site.

[buckworks]

Do they still do that?

Yes, they still do that. I saw it happen within the last six weeks on a site that lost its NOODP snippet during an update.

We replaced the snippet, and within a few days Google stopped using the ODP description and was doing a mix of using our own meta description again or pulling a snippet from the page.

<meta name="robots" content="noodp"/>