From position 12 to position 500, all because the Site Description changed!!

[fulleffect]

Hey everyone,

For the past few months we have been position 12 on Google for the keyword "Hair Extensions", then suddenly we have disappeared!?

On closer inspection, it appears it is because the Site Description has changed?

E.G: (new description)

Hair Extensions - Find a Local Salon
Welcome to Hairextensions.co.uk the largest database of Hair Extension salons in the UK! ... I agree to the hairextensions.co.uk salon terms & conditions ...
www.hairextensions.co.uk/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this


where as it use to be........ (old description)


Hair Extensions - Find a Local Salon
Find a Local Hair Extensions Salon in your area. We cover the whole of the UK. ...
www.hairextensions.co.uk/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this


So the old description matched the exact keyword (hair extensions) and the new one doesn't match it exactly.

So my question is, how do you stop google using certain peices of text on your page. For example i have a 'form' on my homepage, and one of the bits of the form is this.......

I agree to the hairextensions.co.uk salon terms & conditions

So how would i prevent Google from reading/using that bit of text? Put a no-follow tag on it or something?


Any help greatly appreciated.
Daz

[seiretto]

Daz,

Use an image of the text or you can use JavaScript to print the text or html on the page:

document.write("I agree to the hairextensions.co.uk salon terms & conditions");

The bots currently do not read Javascripts, and even when they do it is unlikely it will be used for descriptions (or is googlebot that stupid, herrrmmm possibly, but its OK at the moment).

Do consider the other ramifications though: partial sighted may have difficulties reading an image text; and browsers with JavaScript turned off (even though it will be very few) will not see the text.

Hope that helps

[hostchecker]

I'd change it back ASAP

[fulleffect]

Thanks for your advice Seiretto,

Javascript is a good suggestion, but then the whole "javascript disabled" issue bothers me. So im thinking the image method might be the way to go.

IMO Google should give us a way of preventing it from indexing certain text.

i.e: <noread> </noread>

I'd change it back ASAP

Change what back?

As far as I'm aware, we don't have the ability to control what appears for the "Google Site Description".

It is not part of the Meta Description, if that's what you are referring to ?

[flhu]

All I can think of is that one of my clients also use the keyword "Hair Extensions", and I am that good. (Sorry, I could not resist)

Well, despite the issue of aiding a competitor, I'll throw in my two cents: Did you change the MetaTag "DESCRIPTION"? It looks like the original listing was using a prepared page description and the more recent one looks like google couldn't find the META DESCRIPTION tag and decided to just pull random text from the page.

[MLSDesigner]

Good luck getting it back on the first couple pages of the results. It has been 5 weeks for my Local site now we were showing up on page one and now we are on the last page. I don't think that the description has anything to do with it. We have come to the conclusion that google is manipulating the results to favor there own LOCAL which is thier prerogative i guess, but they are going to put local publishing companies out of business. We did bounce back and forth for a few weeks piror to this last "SANDBOXING" and we are just sitting back now waiting and hoping that we will start getting traffic again. We went from nearly a thousand people a day to, well lets just say not very many.

J

[adtastichosting]

I took a look at your site. There is actually alot of things going on here. First of all, Google is not indexing your meta description tag and that is perfectly ordinary. Reason being, the meta title tag is below it and the bot looks for that first, so it never comes back to the meta description tag meaning it ignores it. From an SEO perspective also, just FYI, the meta description tag could actually benefit from some more textual optimization. But if you will move the meta title tag to above the desorption tag and just below the opening <head>, that will help. But you will need a more relevant meta description tag meaning more content to give it enough juice for Google to want to make it the "relevant" description of the site and/or page so add another sentence or two.

The reason(s) you have fallen in the search engine ranking position (serp) in my opinion is because of (but not limited to as I think there may be a few other reasons such as perhaps the site has been recently moved or redesigned?):
You have been caught by the ever changing Google algorithmic "shuffle" which has recently tightened considerably with respect to content that is getting top placement.

For one, you are being seen (in my professional seo opinion) as rather spammy on your first page with respect to the search term "hair extension." Granted I didn't perform my customary mathematical and precise analysis and this is just an eyeball look but looks spammy to me professionally speaking so probably looks spammy to google to now with its new system. In fact, if I was an editor looking at the site manually I would think it is spamming the search engine altogether in the way its content is written. But that is just my opinion.
And I am only looking at the front page (the most important one), so remains to be seen if this is carried across sitewide, although probably if the front page is any indication.
So my advice if you were my client for what its worth would be to rewrite the page(s), make it friendlier for as if I was an actual customer, strategically input my search terms where they need to be and no more and work backwards (or forwards as the case may be) from there.

[dbramley]

AFAIK Google uses your <meta description> tag for your description in its listings. Therefore I don't think it can read it properly? OR couldnt read it properly last time googlebot popped by.

When I visited your page in IE it wouldnt bring up the page source, I've also ran it through the W3C HTML validator and it failed to give a result (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0)

Not sure if this could have an effect but something you might want to look at anyway?

[Clint1]

Seiretto, the bots can read JS.

Daz, I'm unable to see your source code, you apparently have it disabled. I was able to get to it by saving the page then viewing in Metapad. I notice your tags are sort of 'backwards', I'm not sure if that means anything or if you changed that recently. You have a bot verification tag that's also backwards, but below it could be a problem even though it's between <!----> :

<META content=eTA/9PdyUkpMJ/EHsUcMHkpvTCXsirYy6OH89M3UklU= name=verify-v1>
<!--<link rel="meta" href="/Overview-about.rdf" /> -->

Your page is HTML but that tag above is XHTML: /> which can break the parsing of a page. If that is something recent, you should change it to HTML with the proper closing HTML tag.

But if I had to guess, you'll be back to your regular spot in January because you're probably just another victim of G's "Christmas time small business attacks". For 6 years now, just before Xmas around Oct or Nov, G wages war on small business sites and either removes them from the index, or moves once top-ranking webpages so far back it's the same as being removed. This is so all the big time websites will get all the business. Matt Cutts knows about it and even admitted to it two years ago with a comment like "we don't anticipate any Xmas time 'issues' this year", which is proof something is going on each Xmas. But that statement was a lie since it's still happening to this day.

Webmaster forums all over the place have posts similar to yours. There's a lot of them even at the G forums. This year the pattern (for most) seems to be the Gbot "claiming" it cannot reach any of your webpages. And of course everyone at G blames the website hosts of the victimized sites. I too have been victimized by this atrocity every year for 6 years now, and like most from this year, I also got the "unreachable" error in the G Webmaster Tools console for ALL of my webpages (and the robots.txt file). This is how site owners realized the problem. And yet G will have you believe it's all coincidental that thousands of site owners all at the same time suddenly got unreachable errors. That's BS. My guess is they're getting a cut from the sales of big name business websites. Notice too, this problem has never affected any of the big name websites, only small business.

If you haven't yet, get you a G WMT account and watch the Diagnostics area. But there's nothing any of us can do other than just wait till January and prepare for yet another Xmas of zero sales, and spread the word so that they are finally held accountable.

[google junky]

This is something I wrote awhile back. Maybe it will help you.


Understanding Google description listings
----------------------------------------

Examples of what you see when looking at the listing of a description Google shows in listings.

. <-- metatag description only. If nothing else follows the period.

example: this is my meta description.



. ... <-- everything before the period is the metatag description. The rest is on-page text.

example: this is my meta description. ...on-page text ...and more on-page text



... <-- Is on-page text only. only if ... is used throughout the description.

example: on-page text ...and more on-page text ...and more on-page text stuff