Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I work at a marketing firm, and was trying to convince my boss that we need to start writing meta descriptions for all pages on the sites we develop for clients.

He asked why this would be necessary since Google automatically pulls a snippet of content, containing the keyword(s) that had been searched, from any page listed in its SERPs.

I didn't have an answer for this, and it got me wondering: When does Google actually display the meta descriptions that people write instead of scraped content?

And is it really that necessary to write meta descriptions?

I work at a design firm, and we just redesigned a website for a client. When it came time for the coding, we initially built a development site to work out all the kinks before going live. Then we relaunched the actual site about a week ago.

Here's the problem: Somehow, the developer who coded the site for us (a freelancer) allowed the development site to be indexed by Google.

Now, when you enter the client's name into Google, the development site appears higher in the results pages than the real site! In fact, the real site isn't even in the top 50 search results. The client is understandably angry about this for multiple reasons.

We quickly added a robots.txt file to the development site and a 301 redirect to the real site. However, that did seemed to have no effect on the problem.

Any ideas on how to fix this mess? Thank you in advance!

I work for a marketing agency that just redesigned, rewrote and relaunched a client's website. They used to rank #4 on Google for the company's name (which is a fairly common one, for what it's worth). Now they're at #10 and want to know why.

I'd like to explain to them what happened but don't know myself.

Can someone explain it to me? And can I tell them if/when their ranking might go back up?

In case this matters, I can tell you that it looks like Google hasn't yet crawled the new site.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Thanks for the quick response.

Would the client risk being penalized by Google by leaving the old pages up?

My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones.

However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation.

This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages.

Can anyone confirm my suspicion?

Someone told me that having a URL that ends in .net (instead of .com) will hurt my site's SEO. Is that true?

I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...