Google Search Meta Description Problem

Well, it’s not really strange at all… if you understand how Google works today.

Several millennia ago, Google would always display the TITLE and META DESCRIPTION.

Today, this is not necessarily the case.

Here’s a direct quote from Google:

Google uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the appropriate snippet, including descriptive information in the meta description tag for each page. We may also use information found on the page, or create rich results based on markup and content on the page.

In short, Google can display whatever they choose to display, which may be the description or ANY other text on the page or included in the page’s markup.

The upside of this is that the page can also sometimes rank for any number of keywords besides what it was optimized for, and we’d expect that at least one of these listings will use the actual meta description text.

Hello George,

thank you very much for your clarification.

So I have no choice other that hoping that google will display my desired description?

The current description displayed is very ugly and not informative at all, would be a pity if that coudln’t be changed…

Thank you once again!

So I have no choice other that hoping that google will display my desired description?

It’s ultimately up to Google… but there are things you can do to influence what get displayed (or not).

For instance, it seems Google is currently taking snippets from the embedded store/playlist. So you can markup all that area with the data-nosnippet attribute on the containing DIV, to, as the name implies, tell Google to exclude that part of the page from appearing in search results snippets (the excluded section will still be considered for ranking purposes).

Yeah, so while you can’t directly tell Google what to use, you can tell Google what NOT to use, thereby influencing what Google may eventually use.

Awesome George, thank you so much for taking your time and helping me out. I will definitely try that way!

All the best for you

One last thing I forgot to add: just note that after adding the data-nosnippet attribute, this will not change the search results immediately.

You’ll only see the effect after Google re-crawls or visits your page the next time and re-index the page. This can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or even months. If you use Google’s Search Console, there’s a feature in there to request recrawling of any URL, which can speed up the process.

Great to know, thnk you George!