Faceted navigation, Affiliate links, Meta descriptions - Oh My!

[WalkerM]

Hi, I have recently come across an issue with the faceted navigation / dynamic URLs for one of my client sites:

From a top level category you can filter by product material, size, type and colour. The URLs which are generated go a little something like this: www.domainname.co.uk/category.aspx?finish=leather&colour=--+no+filter+--

When selected, a 'facet' 302 redirects from the main category URL (no canonical tags in place yet - working on it).

The 'facets' are indexed (although when clicked on from SERPs actually go to a slightly different URL than by navigating there from the site) but they don't display the Meta description in SERPs (instead displaying a list of items from a drop down menu held within a table - probably as it's the first bit of copy the search engines see on the page).

How can I get the Meta description to display in SERPs?

Also, I tried to add a link to a 'facet' from my blog (just for testing purposes) and I got redirected to the page via their affiliate program.

Ideally I want to 'link build' to these pages both internally and via the clients blog but it seems as though there'll be no value in it.

Has anyone come across this before and if so, what can I do about it?

FYI they are using IIS 6 with asp.net

Thanks in advance!

[donford]

HI Laura,

I can only comment on one question asked... " How can I get the Meta description to display in Serps?"

Google will use whatever they feel most appropriate for their users. The meta description does hold value, but when Google is returning results to its searchers they will try to return relevant snippets based on what the user searched for.

Example:
Your webpage is about Pajamas and the user searches for Banana Pajamas Google may ignore your Meta description "Family Friendly Pajamas available in cotton and silk for age 2 to adult"

And return "banana pajamas....print sizes kids small..available in standard banana print, adult themes and more.."

Remember search engines first priority is the users, not the websites.

Hope that helps with that question. I leave the other stuff for somebody more experienced in ASP.. I'm a php person myself.

[timhatton]

Is there a meta description tag actually being generated?

[WalkerM]

Yes there is a meta description - it's the same one as for the main category though, before any filters are aplied.  Obv I will look at providing unique descriptions for all of the facets but until I can work out how to get SEs to display them...

[timhatton]

Donford's answer is good then - they're probably ignoring those meta description tags as not relevant to the search query.  So it's not that they won't display them (assuming they're correctly set up) it's more that they're ignoring them as they're not relevant.

From the horse's mouth: "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624