What determines what google uses for description?

[companyone]

Hi,

I have a few pages of my website index by google.

What determines what google uses for description in a listing?

The discription I received is just the copyright line from the bottom of the pages with an email address.

Not very good.

Thanks for ypur replys in advance.

Dan

[tantalus]

The keywords of the search term and the proximity of those keywords to each other on the page.

(You'll often see "..." in the snippet which means that the keywords are not very close to each other on the page)

This is a kind of bump as I have a related question:

Has anyone noticed a marked increase of the meta description displayed as the snippet?

I know this is not new, but I just seem to keep noticing it more and more.

[the_nerd]

I have the impression that they look in the real content first. If they don't find something reasonably related to the used keywords close to the beginning of your file then they check the meta description.

[tantalus]

What I'm seeing is if there are more keywords or better proximity in the meta tag they are displaying this rather than your body content or both.

Oops just read you message properly what do you base your impression on for "the begining of the file"

[Vadim]

First, as Google recommends you may look at your site with text only Lynx browser to see what Google sees.

Second, as far as I know Google takes an appropriate top paragraph (top in Lynx). Usually it is either Alt text from top image (e.g. logo) if you have top image. Or paragraph after top <h1>

Vadim

[jack_dt]

Nowadays you can also 'view a cached snapshot of this page' and 'Click here for the cached text only' version.

Then badda-bing badda-boom, you're looking at the page more or less the way G would see it.