I've never seen this before. In Google, type "Yogananda". My site meilach.com is listed as #7,but the description that's posted there is not what's on my site. They've posted there: "Encapsulations of Yogananda's teachings, a brief biography, background on the SRF and links to other sites." It's a realistic description, and I'm not complaining about that (actually, I'm going to change it to that) My question is, is there a human somewhere at Google that goes through some sites and typed this in? It sure seems like it! Sam
Apparently they've taken to pulling descriptions from DMOZ http://www.dmoz.net/Content/Society.../Paths/Jnana/Raja/Kriya/Paramhamsa_Yogananda/ Seems like a good idea to me.
Aha! That's where they got it. It must have been something done recently, because before Google was taking the description off my site.
It seems like it might have been because your website recently made it to Google Directory. When the update the directory, usually right then, or soon after that, sites with dmoz get new description. But this is again, not a thumb rule.
Wow, I have never heard of that before. Does anyone know if Google has updated their dmoz-based directory lately? I am hoping a couple of my sites will get a boost when they are listed there.
Really? It seems like a definitely BAD idea to me... Those DMOZ guys have a hard enough time just connecting to reality, let alone deciding on the best descriptions for anyone's site/page.
This happened to my site too! I was very surprised because my site used to Rank #1 in google for the keywords in the description, when I checked it today.. it's not even on the first few pages! how do I make google list the description in the meta tags like before??
You can try adding these two lines to your <head>...</head> section: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> Code (markup): I don't know if anyone but MSN Search is paying any attention to them yet but it can't hurt and that way at least MSN won't be using the crappy DMOZ data.
Thanks, my site is still okay with MSN and Yahoo, no description changed and they still rank good.. just Google... Anyway, i will try to change the description in DMOZ ( when did i submit my site to DMOZ?.. damn).