DMoz description used for snippet for some search terms

I have found a strange one - Has anyone else seen the DMoz description used for snippet for some search terms? For my main search term "Auckland Restaurants" the snippet makes sense, but for the search term "Auckland" - currently top 20, Google uses the the dmoz description as its snippet.

Thankfully, the DMOZ description is a good one.

website: www.time2dine.co.nz

 

Haven't seen this. I have seen a bit of dancing in the last few days though of the description used by Google. For a long time now they have taken selected parts of my index page - H1 etc as description. This has recently started dancing with my own meta name="description".

 

If that is the case then "lame" is a conservative description.

 

Yes, I have seen this behaviour with a couple of my websites. Also why is http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ ranking no.1 for books with Amazon pushed to no.3. Does this mean links and link text are becoming less important? Not only that my very homepage is not ranking for my name Dilip Samuel, let alone Dilip.

Bummer!!!

Regards,
Dilip Samuel

 

The DMOZ guys are out gloating about this one but I hae me doots that it'll endure long. It would definitely be a retrogressive step for Google. Let the DMOZ guys enjoy their 15 minutes of recovered glory until the Google guys finish their little experiment.

I'm not actually seeing this for any of my sites, however. And my main site is certainly in DMOZ (unless they've removed it for the bad press I give them ).

 

Has anyone else noticed that many of the descriptions used "right now" are taken from the directory OR are using the meta description from the site?

 

I asked this same question. See this thread:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=10338

Sam Meilach's Personal Website - Since 1995

 

ah, sorry for the dup.

 

I have noticed Meta descriptions being used within the first few days of a page being indexed but I've never seen DMOZ descriptions show up in a serp. can you give us an example query that will show DMOZ descriptions in the results?

 

Google listning:
http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-12,GGLD:en&q=buchwald

listning in Dmoz:
http://dmoz.org/World/Dansk/Edb/Internet/P%c3%a5_nettet/S%c3%b8gemaskiner/Registrering_og_positionering/

Title on the index.html is:
Hjemmesider - Søgemaskineoptimering - SEO - Marketing
http://www.google.dk/search?q=hjemmesider&hl=da&lr=&start=20&sa=N

Best From Denmark
Bytofair

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=futons&btnG=Google+Search

Several in the top 10 are showing DMOZ descriptions

 

Just had a site accepted in google directory.
the google search listing for my homepage shows the description from dmoz.

 

What Google uses for a snippet depends entirely on what search term is used to find your page. Google will try to highlight the search term wherever it finds it on your page, in the title, description, or even URL.

 

Very true Minstrel and very interesting too - kind of scary how smart their bots are.

Also, I've noticed that Google will go to the rare occurrence of using the actual meta description on some sites that are heavy with js, especially in the top of the code, like when used for navigation. This occurs on one of my sites, but again as you pointed out, depending on what keyword was used in finding it. Sometimes it pulls the DMOZ/Google Directory description and other times it will list the description that I have in the meta.

 

Interestingly, as of yesterday, Google's short description for a website of ours changed from what we provided in our meta description over to our new listing in Dmoz.... exactly.

I was under the impression that Google does not have an affiliation to Dmoz except for a fairly strong inbound link.

Can anyone shed some light on this one? Any similar experiences?

Thanks

 

Nothin' new.

 

STOP the press!!!