Description Appearance on Google

Google does not have to use the description you provide, never has – https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Thanks – never knew that and it sort of puts paid to writing cleverly worded descriptions then.

You’d have thought so but Google and most SEO people strongly recommend writing good meta descriptions. The reason for this is because it shows Google you’ve thought about your content enough to provide them with a title and a description even though they may not use it. Writing good titles and descriptions is an essential part of good SEO.

It makes the ‘Preview Snippet’ in the admin panel somewhat redundant – but you do put in a disclaimer that this what it ‘might’ look like in search engine results.

The annoying thing is, the meta description that Google published for my given page looks absolutely nothing like the preview snippet.

Yahoo and Bing both had better descriptions which is some consolation.

Thank you again.

Try using this in Google search:

site:e-toko.co.uk/en/

This will show you exactly what they have indexed for your site.

You can use the Search Tools tab at the top of the search results you can then narrow down by date which will show you when they last updated their index for each page.

Thank you wpsmort.

Interestingly, it looks like Google use a different (better to me) model for displaying the Japanese snippets rather than the English. Everything that appears in the All in One SEO preview snippet in the Japanese version of my site seems to be published verbatim. Not so the English. You’ll undoubtedly know more than me as to why, but it seems odd.

Thank you again for your assistance and keep up the good work.

I must admit I’ve never seen that before but I’ll check around and see if anyone knows why this is different.