Overlength Meta description

[JamesDixon70]

Hi, Has anyone got an answer to why a meta description would be showing characters well above 160. The current Meta description is only 10 characters in length but I wanted to know why Google would display so many characters.

Cheers

Phil

[gazzerman1]

If your description tag is only 10 characters, then Google algo will not find it useful and will replace it with what it thinks is best. It can do this for your Title tags too. Sometimes using Dmoz.

[Immanuel]

Maybe your cms is displaying content as a meta description? Can you show a link?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Gary is absolutely correct. Google can alter your page Titles and Descriptions if they find are not appropriate and can even fetch descriptions from other prominent websites where your website is listed with a description. The best example of such prominent website is the Open Directory Project, Dmoz.org.

So its always recommended to come up with relevant page titles and descriptions that are unique for all your pages.

Most of the time, Google will take the titles and descriptions mentioned by the webmaster in the title tag and description meta tag, but there is no guarantee that this happens 100% of the time. If your website is listed on dmoz and you do not want Google to pickup the description from there, you can use the page level robots meta tag as follows:

Similarly if you do not want Google to pickup the description from Yahoo directory,

Use your page titles and descriptions in such a way that they force the visitor to click on your website in the search results. The title should contain your target term in it. See to it that the Titles and Descriptions have a strong compelling message. Using titles and descriptions optimally can have dramatic improvement in CTR from search results.

Best,

Devanur Rafi