Google listing descriptions
It's always amazed me that "www.rjharrison.org" is a PR6 domain (with other pages predictably ranked PR5 and PR4 depending on their depth in the site). It's amazing because bugger-all people link to me and because i've deliberately made no attempt to promote myself or the site online. Clearly i'm an idiot-savant when it comes to SEO!
Every now and again i do some "ego-searches" on Google: typing in my name, things i've worked on / been associated with etc, to see if they come up in Google's index. I must confess to liking the fact that a search for "richard harrison" normally returns me in the first page of results.
A few minutes ago i did a search for my name and noted that i was still on the first page... but that the description of the site had changed. That was not surprising as i changed the index page within the last few weeks to reflect that i wasn't looking for work; but interesting thing was that instead of taking the first X characters and calling that my site's description, Googlebot skipped over the "old" content and decided that the "new" content would be the description for the page.
The two green sections were the newly added text.
Notice how it's taken the H1 tag "R J Harrison.org" and postfixed the "..." then shown the updated content.
Every now and again i do some "ego-searches" on Google: typing in my name, things i've worked on / been associated with etc, to see if they come up in Google's index. I must confess to liking the fact that a search for "richard harrison" normally returns me in the first page of results.
A few minutes ago i did a search for my name and noted that i was still on the first page... but that the description of the site had changed. That was not surprising as i changed the index page within the last few weeks to reflect that i wasn't looking for work; but interesting thing was that instead of taking the first X characters and calling that my site's description, Googlebot skipped over the "old" content and decided that the "new" content would be the description for the page.
The two green sections were the newly added text.
Notice how it's taken the H1 tag "R J Harrison.org" and postfixed the "..." then shown the updated content.
That intrigued me enough to search for "why" this happens and i found this article:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/whalen/2004/0416_jw1.html
If the searched phrase is in the meta description, then that is used; else Big G picks some copy of the page that it thinks is relevant to the phrase.
Labels: seo descriptions google
posted by Rich at 1:45 AM
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