Google not taking Meta...

[HB17]

Hello all,

So I understand that Google may sometimes take content from the page as a snippet to display on SERPs rather than the meta description, but my problem goes a little beyond that.

I have a section on my site which updates everyday so a lot of the content is dynamics (products for a shop, every morning unique stock is added or removed), and despite having a meta description, title and receiving an 'A' grade in the MOZ on page grader, these pages never show up in Google.

After a little research I did a 'site:www.mysite.com/productpage' in Google and this indeed listed all my products, but interestingly for every single one Google had taken the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as the snippet instead of the meta or any H1, H2 or P text on the page...

Does anyone have any idea why Google is doing this? It would explain a lot to me in terms of overall traffic, I'm just out of ideas...

Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

It could be that the way the content is being loaded dynamically might prevent it from being seen by Google. Did you check their cached, text-only version of the page?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

This ^. Also, are the meta descriptions unique for each page? If they are the same, they would probably be ignored.

[kwoolf]

It's hard to pinpoint the problem without seeing the site but there are a few things you can do. Keep in mind that pages get ranked by popularity and relevance, so use MOZ to see what keywords this page is ranking highly for, if any.

Some templates for major CMS load content blocks in a particular order. Check the raw source for you product page in question and examine the code to see what information comes at the top. You could also fetch your page as Google bot and see what Google sees https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6065797?hl=en&ref_topic=4617736.

About metadata, check out the kind of metadata Google likes here  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en.

Now you can learn more about structured data on Schema.org. Rich snippets are a great way to let search engines know what you want potential visitors to see in SERPs.

[HB17]

Thank you all for your replies!

I've passed these on to our developer, I'll be back with an update shortly.

Thanks!