As of about 10 days ago, Google replaced the meta description in our organic SERP for "scorebig" with the following text:
SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone. See the Facebook Help Center for more ...
This particular text comes from an Facebook iframe inserted into the fb-root
element which is used by the Facebook JavaScript SDK. The text is never actually displayed to users (or to Google), but Google sees it in the final markup and chooses to use it as the description instead of the actual meta description content. Upon reviewing the Google Webmaster Tools "HTML Improvements" section I noted a number of "Duplicate meta descriptions" warnings, 17 of which referred to URL permutations of the homepage. I went ahead and added the missing canonical URL tag to the homepage, and even changed the description of the page entirely, but the duplicate list is still showing what is now stale data.
Since this started happening, I have seen the SERP revert back to the correct description 2 or 3 times, before switching again to the "SECURITY WARNING" text. At least once, the issue was corrected when I used the "Fetch as Google" and "Submit to Index" features of the Webmaster Tools, but this no longer seems to be having any impact. Interestingly, I noticed that the markup retrieved with "Fetch as Google" does not contain the "SECURITY WARNING" text, which would imply that the system used to crawl organically is not the same as the system used to crawl in the Webmaster Tools.
Google is the only search engine behaving this way from what I can tell. Bing seems to be just fine with displaying the correct description. Short of removing Facebook from our website entirely and letting Google pick the next random piece of text that it sees, I am out of ideas.
Is there anything I can do?