Google not pulling correct Meta Description

[inhouseninja]

For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.

Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?

[Felip3]

If Google Understand that your meta description is not as relevant to your page content or search query, they will replace with the content from your page that they understand as more relevant, To solve the issue you can try get list Dmoz, often search engine pull their description from dmoz or rewrite your meta description.

[inhouseninja]

Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.

[KeriMorgret]

Sadly, Google often puts in their own snippet for the meta description, and will even change the meta titles on you too, depending on your query. There's often not a whole lot you can do about it, except take comfort that it happens even to sites like apple.com.

[Felip3]

http://www.dmoz.org/ -> It's Open Directory Project, maintained by a community of volunteer editors, basically is directory trusted by the Search engines and many times the description from dmoz is used as snippet in the search results. When you submit a site for dmoz a human will verify and will accept your site only if it follow the guide lines.

Google can still display their own snippet but I think is worthy a try....

[khi5]

If you have an H2 on your page, maybe try to include same or highly similar wording in your meta description and try to avoid any sentences where relevant words to that page (or synonyms of such words) are not found on your page. I have tried with my own site in past and it has worked. No statistical evidence beyond what worked for my own site, but consider giving it a shot.