Missing meta descriptions from Google SERPs

[suchde]

Hullo all,

I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully.

Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given.  I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs.

Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap!

Thank you in advance!

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[PremioOscar]

Hello there,

Sometimes Google picks up other information from the page rather than using the meta description when it considers that your meta description are not very relevant for what customers have looked for.

Just make your meta descriptions more relevant.

[Chris.Menke]

suchde, as says premiooscar, it is not a given that Google uses your meta description in the snippet.  In fact, in Google's own words, "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." In fact, you can  find that for each different search query that your page comes as a result, you can have a different snippet--it could be the fully from the meta description, fully from the page copy, or a combination of page copy and  meta description info.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
• http://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

[Devanur-Rafi]

Chris has it spot on..

Was just curious at the keywords meta tag on your home page:

With this kind of keywords meta tag you are definitely inviting an over optimization penalty. Moreover, you can safely drop the keywords meta tag and its of little to no use these days and Google does not care about it.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[suchde]

Thank you PremioOscar. Will keep this in mind.

[suchde]

So the only way out would be to have more relevant meta descriptions, right? Any words on that?

Thank you Chris!

[suchde]

Thank you Devanur, I shall definitely look into this. I do have a question though- if Google doesn't really care about the keywords meta tag, then it shouldn't matter what I have written in it, right? So do you think I'll still be in potential danger of an over optimisation penalty, keep this in mind?

[Chris.Menke]

More relevance while leaning towards click through rate/call to action.  It's a balance.

[josh-riley]

We don't even bother populating that section any more. Now, that said, Bing does care about them to some degree, so it depends how much you may care about that search engine.

Matt Cutts has specifically said Google doesn't care about meta keywords, so I find it surprising that it'd be used to penalize.

[Chris.Menke]

No, as long as you're not also spamming your page copy with your specific target keywords.  Nonetheless, it doesn't look very professional.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, yes Google does not care about the keywords meta tag but abusing it is also not recommended as some other search engines still consider this tag a little bit. Moreover, abusing or over optimizing keywords meta tag tells a lot about the intent of a webmaster which is even more dangerous.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.