Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

I am now offering a training workshop for my clients, covering the principles of web site management that support best practice for Google optimisation. Typically it will last a morning or an afternoon, around four hours and covers the main areas for consideration; Content, Visibility and Reputation. Please visit my Google SEO Training page for further details.

Today is Tuesday and the Meta Description I uploaded on Sunday has appeared in the Google SERPs for my site (Meta description in SERPs screen shot). So for the conditions in which my site exists, a lack of a Meta Description tag caused Google to pull my dmoz description entry, rather than compile a snippet from the body text. Although it did this only when the search terms could be found within the Title tag, if they were present in the body then a snippet would be created from the page body text that included the search term.

e.g.:
Title: Steve Johnston, Google Consultant and Internet Strategist
Description: http://www.google.com/search?&q=strategist+steve
Snippet: http://www.google.com/search?&q=internet+consultant+bath

Also, my choice of Meta Description, and the Meta Description length itself, has worked to some extent, as the word Google sneaks in at the end, but I think I will play with it some more. Now I must go and check up on the situation for my clients....(5 mins later) Eeek! Looks like I am going to be busy...

Following on from last week's post, I have updated the meta description tag on my home page to say:

meta name="description" content="Steve is an independent web consultant specialising in the development of strategies for online business and in search engine optimisation for Google; preferably both at the same time, when the sum becomes greater than the parts."

My dmoz entry has held firm since the previous post, so this should be a realistic test. When the Googlebot visits me every day it does so at around 2.00am in the morning. It is 9.30pm now, so if we are lucky this change will be picked up overnight and the changes, if there are any, should appear on Tuesday, or possibly late Monday night.

If and when Google decides to use the Description tag above, I will most likely change it again, once I see what it does with it as a snippet.

More soon....

Google has been found presenting Open Directory Project (dmoz) descriptions as the snippet below the SERPs entries for some web sites. From the accounts of it occuring, it is unclear however what rules are being applied when Google decides to do this. I noticed that it was going on when, after rebuilding my own site, my SERPs entries were affected (DMOZ description in SERPs screen shot). My dmoz entry appears here: Steve Johnston.

In some limited experimentation, it appears only to be happening to the home page location as listed in dmoz and then only when the search terms used appear in the title tags (Google Consultant search currently generates a DMOZ description for my site); if the search terms are in the body then a snippet drawn from the content appears (I am a greying-haired Google Consultant search generates a snippet).

So what I want to test is whether the fact that I ommitted to replace my Meta Description tag following the very-recent rebuild of this site has contributed to Google's decision to do this. I will leave my site as it is for a few days to allow you run these tests for yourselves against my own site (the screen shot will nevertheless record it for posterity) and so that you can also investigate my current HTML source - naked of its Meta Tags, eeek!

Come back in about a week's time and I will have changed the HTML to include a Meta Description tag and Google will have reindexed the site with the tag in place.