I have added meta tag description in my page, but it is not displaying when I search my page in google.
It is displaying something else from my blog page. Please let me know if any one is aware of this.
Thanks in advance!!
Anand
The meta description is only a hint - it's not guaranteed to be used. If you search for your site like this: site:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com instead, then you'll see the meta description, verifying you've entered it correctly.
The snippet that is shown on the search engine result page depends on the keywords the person searches for, so you can't really target any specific text there.
You should also be aware that Google doesn't actually use the description as part of it's ranking algorithm - words that are in the description don't count as part of the page. (i.e. if your description was wueoqwiueoiuoiauiouwqoeuq, your page wouldn't rank for that term if the only place it was was in the description.)
Google does not always show the meta description. If it finds something better on your site to use, it uses that snippet instead.
Look at this article to learn more.
Google may or may not use meta tag descriptions. Mostly it doesn’t, because experience shows that they are widely used by site authors for excessive and often misleading advertising instead of informative content. But in special cases, especially when there are no useful matches for the search words in content, it may use meta tag descriptions, as you can see by googling with
url:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com
Related
Can anybody tell me that why we use meta tag in html
Meta tags helps your website getting found by search engines like Google, Bing etc.
When you use it the right way in combination with some landing page you can get found in the best way. Another method is the use of link-exchange. If you use the 3 methods it could get your websites way better indexed by google then if you only use the meta-tags.
If you want to know more about it, just search on google with keywords: landing page, indexed by google, meta-tags, link-exchange etc.
Meta tags describe your page. Search engines have famously used them to help index your pages. Its got nothing to do with asp.net but rather the HTML output that is produced. See here for more information. Be aware although that search engines rely less on them as they do now and incorporate other factors into their indexing.
Meta tags are used for many things. The most important use for meta tags would be probably for SEO purposes. The meta description is probably one of the most important parts of the meta tag because that is what shows up under the title on Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo. The following link will give you more information about SEO and how you can use the meta tag. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/website-source-code-seo/
The meta tag can also do many other things such as set the author, viewport and keywords of a web page. Here is a link that will tell you a lot more about what the meta tag is used for. https://www.w3schools.com/Tags/tag_meta.asp
I have a page which contains a list of items as its content.
When no items exist, the design which I am to implement has a rather large heading reading something like:
'No results for this topic'
Now initially when I saw the design I instinctively wrapped the 'No results' text in a <h2> tag.
Afterwards I noticed that although I included meta content for title and description - Google displayed the 'no results' text as the title in search results - clearly not being the desired result.
Now on one hand I want to stick to semantic markup, but on the other I don't want it to mess up my SEO.
So my question is: Do I really need to use a <h2> element here for semantic markup?
True, the designer decided to display the text to look like a heading - but does this mean semantically that this is a heading?
Just for fun, I checked what Google does when you enter a search phrase with no results:
Result:
The 'No results' isn't displayed like a heading and (hence) not within a h1-h6 tag.
Disclaimer: I tried searching for an answer at W3C here and here but that didn't really help me here.
Edit: I meant the 'No results' to be an example. Actually, I had similar cases where Google picked up other pieces of not-so-relevant text (which I had wrapped in a <h2> because of the design) as the title - even when the page contained many items.
I think that such message shouldn't appear in h2 tag. But there are also other factors that determine what Google will display. All title, description and keywords should vary between pages but it also doesn't guarantee Google will use them.
In fact Google want to be smarter than we are. For one of my pages for English main page version Google used alt logo to display as page title although title is unique so now in Google it's displayed as mainpage - logo instead of normal title.
If I were you I would change "no results" from h2 to regular text for example p. You should also consider if you really need and should have indexed those pages at all.
Google "guidelines" change very often and they can even punish you if you have many subpages with in fact no content.
-- after editing question --
You should check first that your meta tags if they are unique on your page. It means searches (if it is indexes, pagination pages and so on). As I have written just before there is no guarantee that Google uses them at all. Google can use any part of your site and display it in search result as title or description.
Sitemap has no impact what Google indexes (or other search engines). It only help search engines faster index pages that are for example deep in structure. For sub-pages you don't want to be indexed you need to use in html head:
<meta name="Robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
to stop indexing it by search engines that respect this rule (of course many crawlers / spam spiders don't respect it). After change it takes some time to deindex this page by Google. It depends of course on site size and how often Google spider is visiting your website.
Can anybody tell me that why we use meta tag in html
Meta tags helps your website getting found by search engines like Google, Bing etc.
When you use it the right way in combination with some landing page you can get found in the best way. Another method is the use of link-exchange. If you use the 3 methods it could get your websites way better indexed by google then if you only use the meta-tags.
If you want to know more about it, just search on google with keywords: landing page, indexed by google, meta-tags, link-exchange etc.
Meta tags describe your page. Search engines have famously used them to help index your pages. Its got nothing to do with asp.net but rather the HTML output that is produced. See here for more information. Be aware although that search engines rely less on them as they do now and incorporate other factors into their indexing.
Meta tags are used for many things. The most important use for meta tags would be probably for SEO purposes. The meta description is probably one of the most important parts of the meta tag because that is what shows up under the title on Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo. The following link will give you more information about SEO and how you can use the meta tag. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/website-source-code-seo/
The meta tag can also do many other things such as set the author, viewport and keywords of a web page. Here is a link that will tell you a lot more about what the meta tag is used for. https://www.w3schools.com/Tags/tag_meta.asp
I encountered many sites including stackoverflow.com whose page source do not show META tags like keywords, description.
I am just wandering is it because they blocked it by some sort of tech or they just drop them since, as I know, those tags are not so much valuable as before.
If they blacked them, then what kind of software or tech do they need. If not then how Google extract description from those sites when Google displays search results?
Lot of dumb questions, thanks for your time and reply!
Any input is appreciated!
They're not MATA tags, they're META tags. They are not as important as the actual content of your site and the other sites that link to yours, since it's well known that meta tag content is easier to abuse and misrepresent. Meta elements are more useful in the areas where there is no benefit from such abuse, eg. content encoding or language, but some of this data can be sent by the web server in the HTTP headers anyway. So you rarely, if ever, need any meta elements.
You don't need any sort of technology to 'block' meta tags. Every tag is just a bit of text you insert into your HTML. If you don't want to send out a meta tag, you just don't write it into the HTML.
If you want specific information on how Google views your site then you could start with their webmasters page.
Just had a look around on Google .. may be followings help you something.
Avoid the META keyword tag!
Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many
people still think of this as a quick
fix for SEO. It’s not. Google no
longer uses it. In fact, it is likely
that Google penalizes sites that do
employ the meta keywords tag. Yahoo is
perhaps the only search engine that
still uses the meta keywords tag but
places very little weight on it.
Death of META Tag
pretty old link though
"In the past we have indexed the meta
keywords tag but have found that the
high incidence of keyword repetition
and spam made it an unreliable
indication of site content and
quality. We do continue to look at
this issue, and may re-include them if
the perceived quality improves over
time," said Jon Glick, AltaVista's
director of internet search.
Does filling out HTML meta description/keyword tags matter for SEO?
This article has some info on it.
A quick summary for keywords is:
Google and Microsoft: No
Yahoo and Ask: Yes
Edit: As noted below, the meta description is used by Google to describe your site to potential visitors (although may not be used for ranking).
Google will use meta tags, but the description, to better summarize your site. They won't help to increase your page rank.
See:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
EDIT: #Petr, are you sure that meta tags influence page rank? I am pretty sure that they don't, but if you have some references, I'd love to learn more about this. I have seen this, from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, which is what leads me to believe that they don't:
Even though we sometimes use the
description meta tag for the snippets
we show, we still don't use the
description meta tag in our ranking.
Keywords: Useless
All major search engines don't use them at all.
Description: Useful!
Replaces the default text in search engines if there isn't anything better. Use this to describe the page properly. Not perhaps useful for SEO, but it makes your results look more useful, and will hopefully increase click through rates by users.
If you want your users to share your content on Facebook, the meta tags actually come in handy, as Facebook will use this information when styling the post.
See Facebook Share Partners for more information.
Edit; whoops, wrong url. Fixed.
If your pages are part of an intranet then both the keywords and description meta tags can be very useful. If you have access to the search engine crawling your pages (and thus you can specifically look for sepcific tags/markup), they can add tremendous value without costing you too much time and are easy to change.
For pages outside of an intranet, you may have less success with keywords for reasons mentioned above.
The description meta is important as it is displayed ad-verbatim on Google search results below your site title. The absence of which, Google pulls and shows the first few lines of content on SERPs. The description tag allows you to control what SE users see as a page summary before clicking. This helps in increasing your CTRs from Search.
The keyword meta usefulness is still inconclusive, but SEOers continue to use them. Avoid using more than 5-6 keywords in the tag per page to avoid Google from detecting and penalising due to any suspected keyword dumping.
The problem with keyword meta tags is they are a completely unreliable source of information for search engines. The temptation for people to alter search results in their favour with misleading keywords is just too great.
Those are two of the things that are used by search engines. The exact weight of each changes frequently, they are generally regarded; however, as being fairly important.
One thing to note, care should be taken when entering values. The more relevant the keywords and description are to the textual content of the site, the more weight may be given to them. Of course there are no guarantees as nobody outside of the search engine companies really know what algorithms are being used.
This post talks a bit more about some aspects.