Is this cloaking or some dangerous blackhat SEO tactic?

[Lovingly]

Hey wonderful SEO guys, I need your advice. Would the following be considered cloaking, or a black hat SEO tactic.

I performed the following search for Guess tops on Google: "Guess women's tops." Please see the attached image (Guess 1) of the description tag that comes up with this search. This not the primary page description tag, but when you visit the women's tops tag, that description is not visible on the page. In fact it is placed in the meta name section (see Guess meta-name description image). The information appears as a description on a SERPS depending on the keyword search performed, but the text is just not visible on the tops page.

Can this be considered a form of cloaking? If not, is this a dangerous blackhat SEO tactic, or actually nothing to be worried about? We are thinking of doing something similar with some of lengthy homepage introductions-making them invisible, but still appearing on SERPS, as long as it relates to content that is clearly on the website, or what the website is about.

Please advise. Thanks.

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[Hutch42]

The function of the meta description is to provide a snippet for the search engine to display, it is not a form of masking, that site is using the meta description for its intended purpose.

http://www.wordstream.com/meta-description

[Lovingly]

Thanks for your response Hutch42. I know what meta descriptions are, their purpose and how they can best be used to enhance click-through-rates. Something changed on the Guess site since yesterday when we were analyzing it, so my initial post is now proving irrelevant.

Here is another question: Apart from a page's official description tag, Google will usually pull text from a particular page and use it as part of a description on a SERPS depending on the keywords used in search. The text it pulls from that page may not necessarily be that page's official description tag. Is there way (or would you advise), to add let's say a 200-word article about a business on a page in an invisible manner, while still having Google display any part of that article in a SERPS if any search includes keywords that have been used in that article? So basically, the text is in the back end (not visible on the page), maybe in the html code, but Google can still pick it up and add it's content as an unofficial description in a SERPs if a search contains one of more keywords included in the article?

I hope you understand what I'm asking. Thanks

[DennisSeymour]

I have never seen that happen in terms of Google showing that in the SERPs. You can hide data in the back using JSON and stuff but I have never seen Google put text as the description if it's not visible in the body...at least from my experience

[Sam.at.Moz]

R.E. Original question - Nothing funny here looks like a standard Meta description.

Note: It used to be standard that Google pulled only ever the Meta description but now if they consider it more relevant they'll (Google) will pull any page content that's relevant to the search query, no matter if it appears at the top, middle or bottom of a a page - you really can't dictate this since you can't possibly predict all possible search queries which will result in visitors to your site.

I'd stick to writing strong Meta & page titles & descriptions providing high quality content and letting Google handle what it pulls! You may want to look into the Schema.org markup to see what you can dictate.

Sam