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I have to be honest and say that I have never paid that much attention and it migh have always done this. But I could have sworn it used to display text from the body.
Does this mean that the page has not been indexed properly, that it can't index it, that it's re-indexing it... or does this often happen with some pages?
As an additional note, I have made a few slight changes to the index page in the last week, as well as submitting it to about 100 directories.
Those are the symptoms, I would be greatful of a diagnosis. Thanks in advance.
Yes, the description will be quoted if there's no more relevant a snippet on the page.
Have you checked your coding of the page - Google W3C validator and run the page through it - if it's syntactically in error, there's always the chance that a search engine bot, trying to be fast and efficient, will be less accommodating than a browser.
If the page has frames, check that there's a noframes section, because Google will go there for its snippets.
And do a Google for Spider's Eye View and see what Google sees of your page.
In any event, the page will be re-indexed from time to time, and this isn't a serious problem to fix.
Regards
DerekH
I should have looked a bit harder at this situation (it was quite late when I noticed). It seems google has indexed the full page because it shows up when I search for a unique phrase.
So I gues I wote the Meta Description pretty good because it's still displaying it for the main keyphrase. And I've jumped about 50 places up the results since yesterday.
It was good advice anyway, as it seems Dreamweaver had devalidated the page, and I had made a mistake while adding a peice of code to the head.
...so I guess it did me a favour, there is nothing left to do now but wait and keep building backlinks!
