http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=boat+insurance&meta= The first 2 links on the above search have descriptions that seem to have been added by a person rather than being the result of a robot crawling the site. My site is the first one and we have never had the description they have given us in the source code of our pages. We certainly have never used the phrase "power cruisers" on the site. Has anybody else noticed this?
I have only just noticed this for our site, the text does not appear to be the same as the DMOZ description? http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=boat+insurance+noblemarine I suppose it may change on the next update?
I have seen this for one of my sites... The description isn't from the page/site itself and the site isn't listed in DMOZ. I have no idea where the description came from, although it's not inaccurate.
It could be that Google re-edits some results from the DMOZ feeds: http://directory.google.com/Top/Reg..._Economy/Financial_Services/Insurance/Marine/
dave487 ... you have 2 Google Directory listings: http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/..._Economy/Financial_Services/Insurance/Marine/ Description: "Provides online marine insurance quotations for sailing yachts, power cruisers or smaller speed boats." and http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/...amshire/Newark-on-Trent/Business_and_Economy/ Description: "Specialist pleasure craft insurance, covering yachts, sailing dinghies, sailboards, rowing boats and speedboats." Google are pulling the description from the first one. Your search of DMOZ (aka Google Directory) only pulled up the second one.
I noticed the same thing for my site today. Kind of weak if you ask me...but then again, I think DMOZ is a joke...
I have noticed this for about 3 months. A DMOZ description is used in google search results for a very competive keywords. This is very smart move by Google.
Which same thing, VS? A DMOZ description? Or a description NOT drawn from DMOZ? I cannot determine where that description for one of my forums is coming from - it's not on the site and it's not listed in DMOZ (or at least I can't find it in DMOZ).
I am seeing this weird Google situation as well: - my site (Estate Agents Maidenhead, see sig) with and without the www seems to show different descriptions in Google. - Google seems to be taking the desciption for the site with www prefix from DMOZ. But the site without the www prefix seems to have the correct description. - with Yahoo and MSN everything seems OK. (I wouldn't say this is a competitive search phrase though.) As a result, although my site has higher ranking and more BLs with the keyphrase, I'm going down the SERPs. Any ideas on getting round this???
The description shown in Google search results is the same lame description written by a DMOZ editor. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hustler+lingerie&btnG=Google+Search my store (HustlerPanties.com) carries more lines and brands then the DMOZ editor listed, so it really isn't an accurate description of my site. Yet another reason why DMOZ is useless and you're better off NOT having your site listed...
No. I was trying to find a copy of the Google alerts with the specific description - it's for my psychology forum which isn't listed in DMOZ (AFAIK - I've never seen it and yesterday I double checked with a search and couldn't find it) so it's definitely not a DMOZ description. It's also definitely not in any metatag nor in on-page content, nor as far as I have been able to ascertain has it ever been used as anchor text (it would be a pretty darn long anchor). I don't know where it came from... I first saw it a couple of months back. It's a genuine puzzle...
I've seen G use the first few lines from a page. All I can assume is something goes wrong now and again and it can't decipher the meta for some reason.