Influence how google formats the description ?

[Lassar]

I see descriptions on a google search of varying width.

I am talking about how google justifies the description.

I was thinking about using a character code for line feed, but I am pretty sure google would just ignore it.


Anyone have any ideas ?

Is there anything, you can do to influence it?

[marketing apprentice]

On a related note, I noticed recently google started to have a 3 line bullet points description for some retail sites. Instead of taking the meta description or the first sentence on the page, it's taking the name and price of the top 3 items listed on page instead.

To see examples of this, search for something like "cd tower" and look for target.com's link.

Anyone know how to influence google to display the search result in this way? Obviously it would be great for retailers, you get more space on the SERP (you get total of 4 lines of description instead of 2) and by listing the products you carry, it's more appealing to the user.

[phranque]

it looks like they are using microformats to markup the product content which can result in google displaying descriptions as rich snippets:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146750 [google.com]

[marketing apprentice]

That's what I thought, but I can't find any rich snippet code in most pages that has the bullet point description in SERP.

[phranque]

i only looked at the target/cd rack example you gave.

[mikeavery11]

Nice sharing. I have learned much from this post. Thanks again everybody.