By : Nidhi Gupta

Its a bit difficult to say that how the search engines display Meta description tag. Search engines are always playing around with what they display as the descriptions for any given URL in the search engine results pages (SERPs), so you may see something other than what I see. In fact, its believed that Google has an entire “snippet team” devoted to this!

Below are some of the happenings found in the SERPs as of today, in terms of what they show for descriptions and snippets:

1. Unlike 3 years ago, today Google will default to your Meta description information when you search for a page by URL such as www.example.com. Yahoo does the same, which was also true for them in 2004. But of course, not many people other than the site owners themselves search using a page’s URL.

2. Google will often default to the Meta description information, even if
   the searched-upon keywords do not appear within it, which they weren’t doing
   as much back in 2004.

3. Yahoo will also default to the Meta description info; however, they tend to take just the first part of the Meta description and then add a snippet of text from the visible page copy that happens to have the searched-upon keywords within it.

Read the rest of this entry »