Weird Thing: Google is not reading my Description Meta Tag Properly

[helphelp]

Hi,
For some reason google is not reading the description meta tag on my website. Instead it seems to be reading the html instead.

I ftp'd the index file again thinking that might help and I also went through my html several times and could not find any problems.

Any suggestions would be very helpful.

Thanks,

Al

[tedster]

First step:

W3C Validator - HTML [validator.w3.org]

If an error you see doesn't make sense, we'll work with you to find the fix.

[Jomo]

Just out of interest, how do you know that google are not reading your description tag properly?

It is questionable how much importance google places on the description meta, and often chooses not to use as part of the SERP text.

Jomo

[edited by: encyclo at 3:26 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2006]
[edit reason] no signatures please, see terms of service [/edit]

[myalom]

Does Google use meta keywords for indexing at all?

[tedster]

The snippet Google displays is often the meta description - more often in recent times, in fact, it the meta is relevant to the serch query.

In this case, assuming that a valid meta description is in place, the fact that Google is displaying CODE rather than a usable snippet of some kind seems to me to be a sign that something is wrong on the page. Sure, this "could be" a Google bug, but the first thing to look for is errors on the page that defeat googlebot's error recovery routines.

[netchicken1]

I have seen in the past in other search engines that even a simple comma , or / or - can screw the description tags when seen in the search engine.

However Google doesn't always take the description tag but sometimes uses the first text ont eh page or the H1 heading.

[keyplyr]

It's been my experience that if Google doesn't find the search term in the title nor the description, but does find it in the content, then that snippet will appear in the SERP.

[g1smd]

If the meta description is there on the page then it is nearly always used as the snippet when you use the site:domain.com search.