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.


Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

4. Google does not (at this time) seem to give any weighting to pages when the keyword queried is used only in the Meta description tag and nowhere else.If/when they do show pages that have the phrase only in the Meta description tag, it would tell us that they give some bit of weighting to words in that tag. If they don’t show it, then there would be no weighting attached to the words in the Meta description tag.

5. If the page has no Meta description tag, Google appears to display a description that is almost always the start of a sentence that happens to contain the keyword phrase as opposed to a snippet grabbed from the middle of a sentence. This is interesting, as they often used to just grab the first instance of the keyword phrase, which didn’t always make for a nice snippet. Grabbing the start of a sentence definitely makes the SERP itself look nicer. If the page is listed in DMOZ and lacks both the description and “NoODP” Meta tags, Google will also sometimes display the DMOZ description for a page.

6. If the page has no description Meta tag and is in Yahoo’s directory, Yahoo will default to using their directory description, unless the “NoYdir” Meta tag is placed on the page. If it’s a short description, they will also add some snippets of text from the page. This can look jumbled at times.

7. If the page has no description Meta tag and is not in Yahoo’s directory, Yahoo will take a snippet from text on the page that contains the keywords
   (or some of the keywords) in the query. Unlike Google, they do not take the
   snippet from the start of a sentence, making their SERPs look not quite as
   nice as Google’s.

In terms of what this means as you’re optimizing your pages, it’s clear that it’s worthwhile to create a unique and compelling Meta description for each page of your site, as that will provide you with the most control over what your potential audience sees in the SERPs. Barring that, as long as you have well-written content on the page that naturally uses your keyword phrases, you still have a good chance of having a decent description show up — at
least in Google.