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Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
Hi,
Somehow all my search results in Google, Yahoo and even MSN show the same excerpt for all pages on my blog:
<img src=“http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/5196/serp8sd.jpg” />
The highlighted text is actually the description in my meta tags. I thought that the search engines should crawl my pages to grab some text from the pages as the excerpt but that doesn’t look like the case.
What do you think will happen if I remove my description meta tags? Will the search bots crawl my pages for an excerpt then? Or should I simply use my post title/excerpt as the description?
Also, could my .htaccess redirects be causing this problem?
<pre> # Redirect /david to http://david.itchyhands.com Redirect 301 /david/ http://david.itchyhands.com/ # Redirect broken feed links Redirect 301 /feeds/index.xml http://www.itchyhands.com/subscribe/ Redirect 301 /feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/itchyhands # Redirect 200+ bygone entries RewriteEngine On RedirectMatch permanent /archives/(.*)/index.php$ http://bygone.itchyhands.com/$1/ <pre>Offline
#2 2006-02-06 05:58:54
- neptho
- Member
- From: A cold, dark place.
- Registered: 2006-02-01
- Posts: 48
Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
> The highlighted text is actually the description in my meta tags. I thought that the search engines should crawl my pages to grab some text from the pages as the excerpt but that doesn’t look like the case.
It’s doing precisely what the meta tags were designed for, and is the default behavior of the search engines. You may find that you obtain ‘better hits’ with, or without these tags.
I was running my own CMS software, so I made these somewhat dynamic, depending upon the subject (page) being crawled. I’ve yet to offer any real advice until I get a full crawl with my recent Textpattern install.
As you are doing a 301 redirect, you shouldn’t see any penalty. I am wondering, however, since I supported If-Modified-Since in my native code, what it will take to hack geneeal eTag/cache+hashing into Textpattern..
(As an aside, I must admit that I like your use of subdomains. Back around 2002 I went subdomain crazy, and setup different services on each one – then decided to bring everything into local subdirectories, using mod_rewrite to stitch it all together.. That worked.. but, well, I ended up with nearly a 30k .htaccess for mod_rewrite and various other tweaks (to support WAP clients).)
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
Hi neptho, thanks for your comments. Welcome to Textpattern!
Anyone else with more experience in SEO can help me out? Is it better to leave out the description meta tag?? Thanks.
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
It depend. What do you expect? What are you needs?
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
hi Jeremie, i was hoping for better excerpts in my search results. It looks like my description meta tag is making them all the same. If I leave out the description meta tag in my pages, will that give me a search results with excerpts taken from my blog posts? Thanks
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
I had it once like you have it now, and decided to go a mixed route: Have a description meta element on listing pages (imho they provided no useful text for search engine excerpts), while leaving article pages without that.
At least Google now shows some surrounding text for search matches in articles which generally provide better hints for users on the topic of the article than the previous meta tag entries did.
I am content with the way it worked out, though best practice would be to provide a description element for every single article. But then again one has to go into the labour of creating descriptional text, e.g. it largely depends on whether your article excerpts can serve this need.
Robert
Last edited by wet (2006-02-06 11:54:24)
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
Hey Robert, thanks for your input. Real world experience really helps. Anyway, just to be clear, you are suggesting that I do not include a description meta tag for my article pages – correct?
I’ve tried doing that on another site, but it will take time for the changes (if any) to show up in the search results page. Thanks again.
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Re: Help me fix my google search results excerpts!
> davidwang wrote:
Anyway, just to be clear, you are suggesting that I do not include a description meta tag for my article pages – correct?
That’s what I have done, and it worked for me and my content. But it will obviously depend on the way your site is structured, whether you display full articles vs. excerpts at article listings and so on…
If the current state of Google’s mind does not satisfy you, just give it a try. You can always revert easily, all it takes is a little time for Google to catch up with your changes.
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