Google Oddity

[Ian J]

I have carefully optimised my website home page so that Google shows exactly what I want it to show as the site title and description.

For years Google has used my site description for the listing and I have been happy with that as I believe it to be a catchy phrase that will intrigue people sufficiently to click on the link.

factoring solutions uk - specialist factoring broker who know that most factors don't live up to their claims. They know who do

I have just done my daily check to confirm my ranking and whilst I am pleased still be in pole position Google has now changed the site description to :-

Factoring and invoice discounting broker offering specialist advice including pitfalls to beware of.

The above is my site's description according to DMOZ and for some reason have switched the description from my own meta tag to that of DMOZ. I have also noticed that other sites have also had their Google descriptions changed to that listed at DMOZ whilst those without a DMOZ listing have remained unchanged.

Anyone else noticed anything unusual ?

[peterjhale]

yes , Google now uses dmoz sometimes but not all the time -- it must only be on a few datacentres

I pm'd you about changing my Dmoz description

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by peterjhale

I pm'd you about changing my Dmoz description

Not received

[Ian J]

That didn't last long as my Google listing is now back to normal - very odd

[Ian J]

It was back to normal for 24 hours only as today it's reverted to the DMOZ description

[Ian J]

And today it's back to the original meta tag description. The only possible suggestion that I can come up with for this extraordinary behaviour is that Google is actually female

[Ian J]

Scouting around some of the SEO forums I see that Google has been testing the use of DMOZ descriptions for a while now but no-one seems to know why or what they are trying to achieve.

My meta description is part of my sales pitch and was specifically written to arouse people's curiosity enough to get them to click on the link whilst the DMOZ titles are written in a very bland, flavourless way that completely lacks any hype at all. I should know as I am a DMOZeditor.

In my opinion this will give websites that aren't indexed by DMOZ a potential advantage as their descriptions should make for more interesting reading and therefore a greater liklihood of that all important click.

[ARTzWeb.net]

My opinion on this subject is that Google does not take into account what is entered in the META tags. I think that they also state this in their webmaster info pages.

What is important for Google, is what the sites that link to your site have as description/link text. A generally good trick to get Google to list the correct description is to add a comment tag right after the title tag and insert the description as a comment.

It is important to place this comment right after the title tag to work. Visit my site and view the source code to see what I am talking about. Regarding DMOZ, it is a very important directory to be listed in, as it get's syndicated on many other directories as well. As a result, the description entered there is more important than the description META tag on your site.

Hope this helps,
Pavlos