Missing Description Lines in Google SERP

[Jochen]

Hi All,

Possibly this issue has already been discussed. If so, my apologies, but I cannot find a similar issue when I do a search in the forums.

We have quite a problem with the Google SERPs for a little while now; when a page from our domain is shown, the description (the two black lines between the blue header and the green links) is missing.

I know that this piece of text varies from being the META description tag, the DMOZ description or a part of the body text, but for our site, this piece of text is now not shown at all.

Yahoo and MSN SERPs do not have the same issue.

Has anyone had similar experiences or does anyone know how to counter this issue?

Thanks,
Jochen

[vayapues]

could you post the search term, and the page?

[Jochen]

My site isnt that big, but it's the same problem you see when going to;

http://www.google.nl/search?q=site:speurders.nl&hl=nl&lr=&start=0&sa=N

as opposed to:

http://search.msn.nl/results.aspx?q=site%3Aspeurders.nl&FORM=QBHP

It seems to be a Google issue.. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks :)

[Jochen]

/bump --> anyone have any thoughts on this matter whatsoever? :)

[vayapues]

Your code all looks right. Probably off site issues. What is your DMOZ listing?

[scrubs]

How long has your site been like this in Google? If it has been like this from the start of its life I would suggest it is to do with your page build and the way Google reads it.

The only experience I have had with DMOZ doing this is switching the listing description with the description in the META data, never loosing description entirely.

[Jochen]

It certainly hasnt been like this since the start. Initially, the DMOZ description was listed, and of deeper pages it varied between description or page content. Then since end of January, start of February the descriptions vanished.

My best guess it's a change in the crawling technique of Google, but I wouldn't know how to solve this.

[scrubs]

I've just been searching around and it looks like the majoirty of these cases happen once Google has had an update, therefor making it a Google Indexing issue.

We may need input from other members of the forum to get over this issue as I have not had personal experience of this myself.

I will continue to research! :)

[Jochen]

Yep, my thoughts exactly! Please share if you find out anything.. Thanks for your help :)

[glengara]

A long shot, but you've no TLD declaration and are using a mixture of </> and /> maybe G isn't recognising your description tags...

[dannysullivan]

From what I can see, the problem is that you don't actually have these pages listed in Google.

In other words, Google's not actually spidered them. Notice that you don't have any cached pages option. For example, see this:

http://72.14.207.104/search?&q=cache:http://forum.speurders.nl/

Nothing -- Google has no record of your page in its index. That's why there's no description. It has not text to grab to make a description.

So why are you listed? Google calls this a partially indexed page, a bad name, since you aren't indexed at all. It means it knows that the pages exist only from links to it: http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html

The only odd thing is usually with partially indexed pages, you don't get a title either -- only URLs are shown. However, I'm guessing that Google is getting titles for your pages in other places, perhaps from the links point at thim.

There might also be an issue in that from what I can see, you're delivering up all the body content of your pages in JavaScript. OK, so Google might come to the page, read the title OK but not be able to run the JavaScript to get any body copy. That means no description and nothing to load as a cached copy.

It is a mystery why MSN isn't having problems, of course.

[scrubs]

Those seem like the answers you are looking for Jochen. Cleared up a few queries I had too!

Thanks dannysullivan :)

[Jochen]

This indeed makes very much sense. It is strange that the whole website is partially indexed though, but I think you are very right about the cause. Thanks a lot Danny!

Jochen

[glengara]

Odd all right, G shows 12000+ links and 350,000 pages from the site but none are cached, a similar pages search brings up two sites in a similar situation regarding the description, www.marktplaats.nl and www.marktplaza.nl ......