Google Meta Description

Seeing a LOT more of this.

[James_Dale]

Not sure if this has already been touched on, but lots of the SERPs results I am seeing now seem to be using the metadescription tag as the summary.

This must be back in their ranking criteria then, I guess? Haven't seen so many metadescription entries in the SERPs for a long time.

[Oaf357]

I've seen some movement on this as well.

However, it's movement. If my search term doesn't work well with the description I see excerpts from the page.

[mtaco]

Well, that would certainly be nice. I get tired of seeing
"you must login to see some of the data on this page" when I'm looking at google results for my site. :-)

[metagod]

It only calls your meta description when the search term is mentioned in your description....

so if you are searching for your domain and you haven't got your domain mentioned in your description it is going to call it from your content.

[twilight47]

It seems to me to call searches from content first then meta descriptions.

[metagod]

how do you come to that conclusion?

[echo1573]

I found this question also a long time ago,i dont know if google has started to search <meta name="Description" content="....">?if yes,Description has started to become important!

[dillonstars]

Looks like it is time to start writing a good meta description for each page.... it'll be a late night for me i think

[jon80]

Google is taking my meta descriptions for every page I have indexed on a new site put up on 6th June. It was crawled on 11th June.

[annej]

Google has been using the meta description in serps for some time. Several months. It seems to depend on if you have one of the search words in your description but it's more complicated than that. It must compare the meta description with other text on the site and somehow picks which it will use.

The meta description is well worth spending time improving though. If it includes words searchers are likely to use you have a better chance of your description being used.

[edited by: annej at 11:16 pm (utc) on July 4, 2003]

[aaronjf]

mtaco,

Well, that would certainly be nice. I get tired of seeing
"you must login to see some of the data on this page" when I'm looking at google results for my site. :-)

There is a simple way around this. Put all text you don't want showing up in the serps in an image. Once you get things just right on a page that gets changed a lot - like a home page - new text can really mess things up.

On one of my sites I have done just this. I have an general site information collum on the right of the page. This is the core information that has been optimized. In the left collum I have images displaying news of new products and events. The users get what they need and the SEs get what they need. Has worked like a charm for about a year; I have maintained total control of the discription Google displays. On most sites this might not be that big of a deal. However, the site I have gets refreshed in Google every 7 - 10 days. My site would end up looking like a yoyo.

You can also control the discription by making sure the first 150 or so characters of the page are the page's discription, and lead by the keywork or phrase.