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A site I run has 6 sitelinks in Google search results.

I recently updated all the meta descriptions for the pages that sitelinks are provided for to give better summary text for each link. I then ensured Google re-indexed the site via Webmaster Tools.

Using site:mydomain.com to check the most recently cached version of each page, I can also see that when listed individually, the links to these pages have a description in Google's results corresponding to the updated meta description. However, in the sitelinks it is still the same text description as was there before I updated the meta tags. I can't understand why this is happening if Google has a more recent cache of those pages, I expected to see both the sitelink description and traditional search result description of the same page update at the time of re-indexing?

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    How much time have you given Google? I believe that the sitelinks are derived differently and possibly from another source so it may not be as instant as you want or used to with the regular index. I will let someone answer who may know more.
    – closetnoc
    Jan 17, 2015 at 18:00
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    It's been around a week. As you allude to, the way the sitelinks are derived is what I can't find any specific information on. I expected that the sitelink description would be updated at the same time as that individual page is re-indexed.
    – Welly
    Jan 17, 2015 at 18:31
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    I suspect this is coming from the Google Knowledge Graph/Vault and may take more time. I have not studied this too much and as you said, there does not seem to be much chatter on how this works.
    – closetnoc
    Jan 17, 2015 at 18:48

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We have had the same "problem" of GWT taking a long time to update the meta descriptions (or realise there is no duplicate any more).

I don't know what it uses exactly, but it can literally take a few months for the issue to no longer show up in GWT. Even with resubmitting the pages in GWT does not help the situation.

GWT is nowhere close to real time, sorry for the bad news ;)

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