I used to know this piece of information, but it’s since slipped out of my brain. In my individual archive template, how do I encourage Google to display particular content in its search results? Meta tags are long dead, obviously, and search engines are usually pretty smart in identifying meaningful snippets to cite.
Unfortunately, since switch this site’s back-end over to WordPress, Google’s search results have gotten all bollocksed up. For each, search for ‘things to do in Vancouver‘ (scroll down a bit). Here’s the snippet Google shows:
Offbeat Things to do in Vancouver | DarrenBarefoot.com
11 Responses to “Offbeat Things to do in Vancouverâ€Â. sxKitten Says: September 7th, 2005 at 2:07 pm.
Check out Lynn Canyon as an alternative to Capilano …
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2005/09/
offbeat-things-to-do-in-vancouver.html – 22k –
Obviously, I’d prefer the snippet to start with the main entry (“Dave writes with a request. I figured local readers could help out, and suggest a cool destination or two…”) as opposed to this odd bit of content from lower down on the page. Any suggestions?
I imagine the first step would be to eliminate the Heading 3 tags around that content, eh?
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for your comments and suggestions. And thanks to Kaf’s plugin, I’ve now got automagically generated meta descriptions. We’ll see if that helps.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Meta tags aren’t dead, they just aren’t used to calculate rankings. I haven’t looked into this lately, but I believe Google will look at your meta description and use that.
All right, I exaggerate the dead part, but I don’t think Google will (at least not universally) use the meta description. I just had a look at two pages at random:
The page’s meta description starts:
“Adoption of high-speed internet at home grew…”
Google’s snippet reads:
“Home Broadband Adoption 2006: Home broadband adoption is going mainstream and that means user-generated content…”
I found a similarly inconsistent result with this iFilm page and the associated search results.
I believe it works (something like) this:
If google finds the exact search string on the page then it will use a snippet from the resulting page that includes the exact match and its surroundings.
If the exact search string isn’t found then the goog returns the meta description as the snippet.
So it’s worthwhile to set the meta description. It won’t always get used, but sometimes it will.
On second thought, I realize that the page will probably always have the search terms on it. I think this is what I meant to say:
If the meta description has the search terms in it then it gets used. Otherwise google picks a snippet from the page that has the search terms.
Or something like that…
After reading your entry here in my Bloglines subscription, I then coincidently read How to Insert META Description Tags in WordPress. It summarizes what I was going to suggest, IF meta tags are used.
You can put this code around areas you DON’T want Adsense to look at. I ususally wrap my sidebar and footer in it because they will throw the results:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->.
.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
Did you blog about why you moved from MT to WordPress? I’d be curious to know why.
I think he said it was for because of lagging comments Michael.
Seems there are a lot of WP converts lately. I’m tempted to move off of my cheapie blogger page and try one myself!
Michael: Yep, the site was running incredibly slow, and the easiest solution was to move to WordPress.
Dustin’s second comment is right, Google’s snippet is the meta description be default, then there are bunch of variables for when it isn’t the meta description.
Of course, testing this will turn up many exceptions – if the search phrase doesn’t show up in the meta description, then the snippet is from some hiearchical selection of title and types of page content.
So basically I’ve always gone with the meta description as the de facto practice for creating good snippets. This is extra true if you have a commercial site with lots of indexed product pages. The snippet then becomes very important.
Movable Type seems to be fickle depending on what host you are using unfortunately. It’s possible that your host upgraded to PHP5?
I’ve been on hosts where I feel myself getting older every time I make an update. I’m on hosting now where MT updates lightning fast. If I hadn’t found it, I might have abandoned MT too.