My Google result isn’t correct! Why?

Most of the time our Google results display the way we want them too. But on occasion, Google can do strange things and pull in information from other trusted websites to use in your Google result.

One classic case includes Billabong.com.au (and the US-based billabong.com site) where there is no meta content description tag in any of the pages on the site.

So where is Google getting the below highlighted information from?

Normally the meta content description tag is used by search engines to display the highlighted two-line snippet underneath the main result link (in blue) which is the Title Tag of the page.

To make things even more complicated, sometimes Google displays “page snippets” where it ignores the meta content description tag and pulls content from the body text of your page to display instead.

Even worse, sometimes these issues can impact on your reputation.

Check out the Google search result for Sydney Airport.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t spell “traveller” with one “l”.

They do in America though, and therein lies our first clue as to what’s going on.

Because, like Billabong, Sydney Airport doesn’t have a meta content description tag, so what Google does is head off to a trustworthy source to fill out the result description on behalf of the airport.

Isn’t that nice of them.

That ‘trustworthy source’ is DMOZ.org, the world’s largest human edited directory. It’s great to be included in DMOZ because it can provide an almost instant search engine ranking boost. But as you can see, it can be a double-edged sword as the editors who list website descriptions are not marketers. They tend to be rather dry and boring in their descriptions.

So how do you get around this? How do you stop Google taking control of YOUR results?

First of all (Billabong and Sydney Airport), add a meta content description tag to all your pages.

The second thing to do is add an additional meta tag to your home page which stops Google using the DMOZ (or Open Directory Project – ODP) result.

This is what it looks like: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>

There’s lots of information from Google’s webmaster central area which you can discover here.

There’s also another tag you can use to prevent both Dmoz and Yahoo Directory results showing up too: <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir” />

Seriously though Billabong, you really want to fix this: “Pro-active site takes a while to load.”

Ouch.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.