Meta Descriptions not working for google search

Question

I have unique meta descriptions on each of my pages, and when I search my site in google it will come up with no description.

Any idea what I might have done wrong?

Answer 1

You should review your site in Google Webmaster Tools, check for HTML suggestions and errors. They'll tell you if there's a problem with your meta tags. I would also check that your robots.txt isn't blocking Googlebot. View your site in your browser check the source see whats there. Maybe some scripts are conflicting and messed up your descriptions?

Answer 2

You don't have control over whether or not Google uses your meta description tag in its search results. That content can come from various sources and it is up to Google to decide which it thinks is best for that result.

From Does Google use the Meta Description Tag for Description of Page?

Google will choose your search results snippets from the following places (not necessarily in this order):

1. The page's Meta Description tag
2. The page's Open Directory Project (ODP) Listing
3. Page content relevant to the search query

If you do not want Google to use the ODP listing's description then you can tell them not to do so with the following Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

If you want to encourage Google to use your Meta Description tag then make sure it is unique to each page. Also make sure it contains an accurate description of the page's content.

In thew absence of an ODP description and Meta Description tag, Google will use a portion of the page's text as the description. This text will contain the closest matches to the search query. I have not seen any official limit to how long this can be but a couple of sentences seems about right.

On a related note, if you don't want a snippet to be shown with a particular page you can use the following Meta tag to prevent one from being shown:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

See this blog post for Google's tips on using the meta description tag.

According to this site, "The meta description should typically be at most 145 to 150 characters in length as these are the maximum number of characters typically displayed at Yahoo! and Google, respectively."

Answer 3

You may want to check your robots.txt often times if a page is blocked by robots.txt but Google finds it another way (external sites linking to it) they add the URL but do not index the content, the result is typically the URL showing up for specific queries such as "site:examplesite.com" search without any description.