Specify description in search results

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Specify description in search results

Description of website on Yahoo

Adam5000

7:10 pm on Jul 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

Greetings all

My website is appearing in the Yahoo search engine and that's great. But I'd like to specify the description. A description is there now, but it's one that Yahoo somehow came up with, and I'd like to put in a different one. I'm currently using the meta tag <META NAME="description" CONTENT="My website is great!"> and it works with Google, but not with Yahoo.

Help!

phranque

8:11 am on Jul 9, 2013 (gmt 0)

do you get the same results in a bing search?
(yahoo uses bing's search index)

perhaps the tips in the Meta Description section here will be helpful.
Heads up on <head> tag optimization (SEM 101) - Webmaster Blog:
http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/07/18/head-s-up-on-lt-head-gt-tag-optimization-sem-101.aspx [bing.com]

lucy24

6:32 pm on Jul 9, 2013 (gmt 0)

I seriously doubt it's because the search engine can't see your meta description. More likely it doesn't, ahem, like the meta description and thinks it can do better on its own. When you consider that The World's Leading Search Engine routinely makes up whole new titles for a page, changing the description is pretty minor.

You might even consider it a good thing: different search engines show different information. If they were all identical there wouldn't be much point would there.

Robert Charlton

7:51 am on Aug 15, 2013 (gmt 0)

I'm wondering whether the site is listed in the Yahoo Directory, and, if so, whether the "noydir" attribute is still necessary to keep the Yahoo Directory title and descriptions out of the Yahoo serps.

I've just continued to use NOYDIR as a matter of course, along with NOODP, but I'm not sure what may have changed in recent years.

See discussion here from 2007...

Yahoo Formalizes NOYDIR Tag
http://www.webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search/3267035.htm [webmasterworld.com]