Controlling summary text of each page in SERPs

Hi

For the summary of each page in the search results for site:domain.com, how do we control whats shown on the summary part ? I thought it was whats shown in the <h1> tag but that doesnt seem to be it.

Thanx

 

There are several places google comes up with the description:

- dmoz-listing for that page, if there is one (you can exclude that one through the no-odp tag)
- description tag: you control that one
- snippet from the text on the page.

Anyhow: what shows up when you do a site-search isn't related (much) to what shows up for people when they find your pages in the serps. The description there is one of the above: fitted to the query the user typed in.

 

By the way, this is a rather overlooked aspect of se's nowadays. What description shows for which keywords is very important on converting impressions (searches) to clicks. Make sure you test a few different scenarios so you can see what the serps look like when you do show up.

There was a good discussion on that recently here at seor.

-Michael

 

From my knowledge, Google uses the first one of these sources in descending order, depending on whether they're available or not:

- Dmoz website description
- Meta Description Tag on website
- Text Snippet from your website

So the Dmoz description is the 1st choice for Google, Description Tag 2nd, otherwise a text snippet is used.

In case you don't want Google to use your Dmoz description, use the NoODP Tag for prevention:

<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">

Code (markup):

To stop Google from using Text Snippets from your website as description, use:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Code (markup):

However, this does also remove Google's cached version of the corresponding webpage (as described at Google Webmaster Help Center).

This is an excerpt from Controlling Google Search Engine Result Description article at my Blog.

Hope this helps!