Will Google Always Use My Meta Description Tag?

When you look at your listings in Google on some occasions the description part of the snippet may not always be your Meta description.

The reason for this is that Google always wants to return the most relevant information to the searcher and your Meta description may not be the most relevant text to show. This will depend on what the searcher types into the search engine. For example, the search query text may appear half way down your page. Showing the Meta description may not be the best fit for this query. So instead of showing the Meta tag Google may display a block of text that contains the search query. See an example from the Evolution website below.

If you did a search for “ecommerce development” you can see below that Google will return Evolution’s Meta Description.

However, if you do a search for a more targeted query “ecommerce features and benefits” Google will actually return a snippet from the actual page content.

The snippet as it appears on the webpage.

So you can see that Google will not always use the Meta description and will try to return the most relevant snippet available. Google also sometimes return the ODP – Open Directory Project listing if it feels that this is more relevant or if your website was down at the time that Google cached your website.

Below is a video hosted by Matt Cutts, the head of spam at Google describing this in more detail.

You may also be interested in:

1. Is the Meta Description Tag an Endangered Species? Google says it reserves the right to change what description it shows about your webpage. Why do they do this? ...
2. Please Say 10 times – The Keyword Meta Tag is Dead Keyword Meta Tag is dead, please get over it....
3. Should I Use Product Descriptions From My Suppliers Website? When it comes to writing your product descriptions you could be unknowingly making your website invisible to the search engines....
4. New Feature To Save ‘Whole Seconds’ In Google Search! Google Chrome's new Quck Scroll feature provides improved search functionality boosting Google's bid to increase chrome users. Read The Full...
5. Google Explains How Its Robot Works Here is a great new information and tutorial source for SEOs and webmasters looking to control the crawling and indexing...