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Why is Google displaying a sentence from my content instead of meta-description in the SERP?

by Helios
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Does Google ever not show the meta-description and instead show part of the content in the search results entry?

I changed my meta-title yesterday to include my keyword twice ("Keyword - Info about Keyword"), and for some reason Google decided to show the first sentence of the article content, which also includes the keyword, instead of what's in the meta-description tag.

Any ideas? Ever heard of it doing this?

I don't think I did anything wrong because I went to my site, right click -> view page info, and the meta description is correct; google is just now using it. And Google has always used it until today, which coincided with me changing the title.
#content #displaying #google #metadescription #sentence #serp
  • Profile picture of the author e21 SEO
    I have no ideas either, my joomla website also have the same situation
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  • Profile picture of the author Helios
    After doing some quick research I found this recent blog post from Google:

    Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April - Inside Search

    More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. [launch codename "solar", project codename "Snippets"] This change makes it more likely we’ll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets when that text is particularly relevant.
    I guess this is happening to me. What I don't know is if it's better or worse than the the description I manually wrote and put in. We'll see I guess.
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  • Profile picture of the author kochtgr
    Originally Posted by Helios View Post

    Does Google ever not show the meta-description and instead show part of the content in the search results entry?

    I changed my meta-title yesterday to include my keyword twice ("Keyword - Info about Keyword"), and for some reason Google decided to show the first sentence of the article content, which also includes the keyword, instead of what's in the meta-description tag.

    Any ideas? Ever heard of it doing this?

    I don't think I did anything wrong because I went to my site, right click -> view page info, and the meta description is correct; google is just now using it. And Google has always used it until today, which coincided with me changing the title.
    Actually if you changed it yesterday it just takes time for google to change it, that's all...
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    • Profile picture of the author Helios
      Originally Posted by kochtgr View Post

      Actually if you changed it yesterday it just takes time for google to change it, that's all...
      I changed my meta-title, not the description. When the title updated (correctly), Google also changed the snippet by displaying the page content instead of the meta-description.

      I have a theory Google chose to do that because my title and description are too similar.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tacit
    All meta tags (inc title tag) are only a recommendation to Google, and they will regularly override them in the SERPs to what they think is best. I have seen them rename the titles of pages of high authority websites to the anchor text we were heavily back linking the page with, even when the page had barely anything to do with the anchor text we were using.
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  • Profile picture of the author seemashah
    yes, it will take time for changing but sometime google take meta description from content.
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  • Profile picture of the author sakthiganesh
    I also have the same issue. I have clearly provided my description meta but Google has found some other description that extracted from the particular page content.
    Is that done accidentally by the Google algorithm or it deliberately replaced by Google for relevancy?
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    • Profile picture of the author jwmann2
      Originally Posted by 88dbsakthi View Post

      I also have the same issue. I have clearly provided my description meta but Google has found some other description that extracted from the particular page content.
      Is that done accidentally by the Google algorithm or it deliberately replaced by Google for relevancy?
      They do include the relevant keywords extracted out of the paragraph. My website has the same problem. I uploaded an extension that provides keywords and descriptions to all of my articles and categories and Google still extracts the first paragraph of the page. Weird.
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  • Profile picture of the author Venus Brown
    Originally Posted by Helios View Post

    Does Google ever not show the meta-description and instead show part of the content in the search results entry?

    I changed my meta-title yesterday to include my keyword twice ("Keyword - Info about Keyword"), and for some reason Google decided to show the first sentence of the article content, which also includes the keyword, instead of what's in the meta-description tag.

    Any ideas? Ever heard of it doing this?

    I don't think I did anything wrong because I went to my site, right click -> view page info, and the meta description is correct; google is just now using it. And Google has always used it until today, which coincided with me changing the title.
    Meta Description explains the theme of your webpage.If the one you made is not so much explanatory in Google's eye, It may take small snippet from your content.
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  • Profile picture of the author C Rebecca
    Yes, sometimes Google amends description of the page in search results. Its because, sometimes, Google believes that your specified description is not suitable for the page, so, it pick a snippet and reflects in search results.
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