Forcing Meta Tag Description in search results

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Forcing Meta Tag Description in search results

Forcing meta tag descriptions

nevets steven

9:30 pm on Jun 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

Anyone know how to force search engines to display your description meta tag in the search results rather than the section of the text that matched the customers query.

Eg if my meta description is
"My site is cool, visit it"

but on my site it has the text

"This is a cool site"

if a customer searches

"This is a cool site" that is displayed rather than "My site is cool, visit it"

any help appreciated. Thanks

Samizdata

11:55 pm on Jun 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

I doubt you can force search engines to do anything unless you win a case in the Supreme Court.

You might be able to persuade them to use your meta description by making it a bit longer.

Something around 75 characters written in grammatically correct English should do it.

nevets steven

12:02 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

na that doesnt help. You will know from your own searches, they always display the information that is relevant to your search, but there must be a way to specify

DamonHD

1:51 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I don't know why you feel that "there must be" since the SEs are extremely keen to avoid being manipulated, eg in case the description supplied is deliberately deceptive. It used to happen a lot in the past and thus I should think that G at least is unlikely to allow it to happen again.

Rgds

Damon

jdMorgan

1:57 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

Be aware that this disables caching of your pages by Google.

Jim

nevets steven

2:01 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

yeah that takes away the whole snippet and removes the cache. I want the snippet to be there but for it to be my meta description not the relevent text.

I resigning to the fact it is not possible :(

jdMorgan

2:08 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

Make your meta description longer and relevant to the page, use nosnippet, and your description will show.

Jim

nevets steven

2:41 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

ok I shall test it on a deep page and see if it all works out the way it is suppose to. Thanks to all those who offered advice.

DamonHD

2:42 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

So Jim,

The relevancy test is robust enough to prevent a re-run of the misleading-description problems that I used to see? Interesting.

Rgds

Damon