My Site Description is Displaying Incorrectly In Google Search

Article: My Site Description (Snippet) is Displaying Incorrectly in Google Search

Just when you think you have it all figured out, the complexity of Google’s algorithms strikes again!

Something has had me puzzled.

Why does Goggle sometimes show the description (snippet) from my site’s meta description tag on some results and my article’s keywords on others?

The snippet is the short summary that appears after the clickable link title: (See Below For Example)

From a search of  “Lenovo X301,” results wil populate with a title and description. That description is often called a site snippet.

< meta content=’ My Site Description ‘ name=’description’ />

I used to believe that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages (SERPs), right?

However, today it appears that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the information you place in this tag is *not* given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of weight in Yahoo’s.

In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, it won’t affect the position of your page in the SERPs for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could easily leave it out altogether.

So, what should I do about meta description and keyword phrases?

Well, if you’re already happy with the “snippets” of text that the search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there’s no reason to have a Meta description tag on your pages. Period. Its important to note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher typed into the engine.

Note: Google most commonly determines page descriptions from an assortment of the text on the page; usually the first 25 words or less.

Duplicate Meta Descriptions On Blogger

From your Google Webmaster’s account, you will notice that your site will have a large amount of duplicate meta descriptions. Unlike WordPress, you do not have the ability to edit the meta tag description for each of your article. Plus, WordPress utilizes keywords – on Blogger, it’s labels.

But, when thinking about SEO, is Google punishing your Blogger site?

For those articles that appear with duplicate meta descriptions in Google SERP:

• Are my keywords ranking poorly?

• Worse yet, was my article penalized?

• Should I try to place the articles most relevant keywords in the first couple of short paragraphs of my blog article?

• Did I lose traffic conversions because the snippet failed to display more of the posts relevant content?

• Or is it simply because being a site owner, searches for my own pages appear different for me because my searches are URL-based as opposed to keyword?

How does Google structure the results on it’s own results page?

One of the most common and recurring responses in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum is, “Google will show whatever it likes as the snippet – whatever is most relevant to the search.” I can appreciate that. But, that does not assist us in our understanding, gentleman.

Let’s move along.

For each page in its search engine result pages, Google tries to show the most informative title and description. To achieve this goal, Google uses three sources of information:

• title and description copied from the Google Directory (based on DMOZ)
• title and description found in the HTML headers of the page
• title and snippet extracted from the text of the page

More people will click on a link with an appealing title and description. In an article titled “Improve snippets with a meta description makeover“, Google insists that they write quality non-redundant descriptions.

Optimize the title and the description

When Google decides to use the text of your META “Description”, it will not be able to show all the description if it is too long. It is useful to optimize the visible part of the META “Description”. This is true for the title too. If it is too long, Google will truncate it and only a part of it will appear in the SERP’s.

Hundreds of result pages were analyzed to understand how Google truncates the title and the description in its result pages.

How will my page appear in the SERP’s ?

Check what Google could show from your title and description with our tool: if the result is not attractive or not clear enough, edit the title and the description in the HTML header of your page and test it again. An easy and effective optimization that can increase the CTR of your important pages !

Technical Limitations

Google algorithms are complex and often changing and cannot guarantee that their tool will be perfectly accurate in all cases.

This tool is designed to optimize pages in English. It does not support foreign character sets.

What are your thoughts on this? Is my thinking wrong? How does Blogger compensate for this then?