What are your feelings on this <meta name="description" content=bats"baseball bats, wooden bats"?? the word bats just after the = sign? as opposed to the proper set-up between the quote ("xxx") signs? Im not trying to learn or tweak anything, just that a script I just installed has to have a descriptive word there for some odd reason. will it be read by the G spider?
Your Problem: That is a malformed HTML <meta> element. I would highly recommend figuring out how to fix the script so that it builds a proper <meta> element. Google is pretty good about handling bad HTML. But by "handling" I mean that a lot of times they will just ignore the malformed segment. Also the "value" of your <meta name="description"> element's content= attribute above is terrible. It should be a sentence with a max of 145-150 characters (unless the URL is targeting a very long tail phrase like a 5-8 word keyword phrase). Ideally it will contain a call to action to convince the user to click on your SERP entry should it appear as the snippet in the SERPs. It appears instead to be a value that would typically be used in the <meta name="keywords">, NOT the <meta name="description">. If You Cannot Fix the Script: There is only one way of knowing how they will view it IF you are unable to fix the script. Test and find out. Fortunately, the <meta name="description"> element is ONLY used by Google to display as the snippet of text in the SERPs between the <title> of your page and your URL. It's not used at all by Google for ranking your URL. How Google Picks the Snippet: If a user searches for some keyword phrase that your URL ranks for, Google has to decide what to show as the snippet for your URL in the SERPs. Google always likes to highlight/bold keywords from the search phrase in the <title>, snippet, and URL shown in the SERP. For the snippet in particular, they always seem to want to be able to hightlight ALL of the keywords if they don't use a DMOZ description. From what I've seen their logic for determining the snippet is as follows: 1) They check DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) to see if your URL has an entry there. If it does then Google will typically show the description from DMOZ as the snippet in the SERPs. The logic behind this appears to be that it is guaranteed to be a human (DMOZ editor) generated description of your page and "supposedly" an unbiased description as well. If your URL does NOT have a DMOZ entry then they go to step 2 below. 2) Google will next look to see if all of the keywords from the search phrase exist in the <meta name="description"> element for your page. If all of the keywords in the search phrase also exist in your <meta name="description"> element then Google will typically show your <meta name="description"> element as the snippet. I'm pretty sure that it is also a requirement that your <meta name="description"> element's value be of a certain length. This is probably why Google's Webmaster Tools will report URLs w/ short <meta name="description"> elements. If all of the major keywords from the search phrase do NOT appear in your <meta name="description"> (or possibly if your <meta name="description"> element is too short) then they go to step 3 below. 3) At this point, Google has no choice but to build a snippet. They typically do this by searching through the <body> of your HTML source code and grabbing sentence fragments containing the keywords from the search phrase, usually parts of the first sentences they find that contain each of the keywords. It doesn't have to be a single sentence fragment with all of the words. They will often pick a different fragment for each of the keyword phrases. The Test (ONLY if you can't fix "the script"): Pick a page on your site that ranks for some known keyword phrase. Make sure that the portion of the content= attribute that is enclosed in quotes contains all of the words from the targetted keyword phrase that the page ranks for. For example if your page ranks for "targetted keyword phrase" create a <meta> element like: Wait on Google to recache the page with the malformed <meta name="description"> element. If you don't know how to determine the last time a page was cached, you can simply click on the "Cached" link next to the URL in the SERPs and look at the very top of the cached page in the gray bar for a sentence like "...It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Jun 25, 2009 02:00:51 GMT..." This is the last time Google cached the page. The Results: Once you know the page has been recached then go to Google and search for the targetted keyword phrase that you know it ranks for. What is showing in the SERPs as the snippet? My guess is that they construct a snippet even though the quoted part of the content= attribute contains all of the keywords from the "targeted keyword phrase" because they couldn't parse the <meta name="description"> element. I'd be interested to hear the results if you actually do the experiment.