Meta description of homepage, changing to latest post

[Bio-RadAbs]

Here's something strange I noticed. The meta description for Engadget when doing a Google search is their latest blog entry.

However, if you land on the homepage and view source the page, the meta description is a standard one for their homepage.

My first impressions : Wha? How? and Wha?

Could it be because it is a "news" site, Google goes "go on, have custom meta descriptions of your latest entry.."

Thoughts?

[ske11]

It is the same on the mobile section too http://www.engadget.com/topics/mobile/

[TomRayner]

Well, first of all the meta description is only a suggestion to Google of what to put in the text underneath your SERP. It's by no means an order.

Second, if you jump into the source on the Engadget homepage, it doesn't actually have any meta description code.  So there's nothing there to suggest to Google what to have show up in the SERPs.

So, how does Google work out what to whack in there? Well, in the same way that sometimes Google decides what would be the best title tag for the user, it can work out what would be the best thing to display.

Currently, I'm seeing this description:

"Nokia's Q4 2012. From somewhere atop a Finnish mountain, Stephen Elop is both bellowing and whispering Nokia's fourth quarter and full-year financials."

This is the combination of the third article's image alt tag and the first line of the article on the page.  With it being the third article, it is probably the last time Google crawled the page and updated it's SERP display accordingly.  So, Google is pulling the alt text of the image and the first sentence of the article it has seen.

Now it's worked out nicely in this case, but it may not be so smooth for other articles. I imagine Engadget have this in mind when producing them.

If anything, shows you how useful alt text can be for images.  It's not a solution for everyone and unsure what the SEO ramifications would be (wouldn't be anything too major, I'd suspect).  But very interesting to see, thanks for pointing it out!

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hmm, see I see the meta description defined in the source

name="description" content=“Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics”/>

I know Google will generate the meta description on its own if no description is provided and Google at times will display a different meta description and titles if the data provided isn't more suitable (Experiencing this on one of my pages)

But it's strange for a defined description that relates to the homepage, this is happening.

[TomRayner]

Woops, so it does. Must have mis-typed when Ctrl+F'ing