Meta Descriptions and Better Search Engine Snippets for Users

Today I read an interesting article on Meta Description Tags that I wanted to share with you. It was featured on the Google Webmaster Central Blog and is entitled Better Snippets for your Users. 

What’s interesting about this article is that it implies that Google prioritises content over the Meta Description to create the snippet. In my experience Google has always seemed to favor the Meta Description over the page content unless it’s a long tail search. In this case it seems to use adjacent body text to the actual search term to generate the snippet.

Another interesting fact covered in the post is that DMOZ has gone and Google has stopped generating snippets from its data. Fifteen years ago DMOZ played a big part in the Google search and ranking algorithms and it’s quite a historic landmark for them to say that they’ve reached the end of the road.

On a personal note, I am very glad. I registered the London Web Factory when we were based in Wimbledon in 2004 and I couldn’t find the login details to update our entry. This meant that from time-to-time Google would define us as a Wimbledon based company which we haven’t been since 2009.

Poor password management I’m afraid and I had exactly the same problem with Friends Reunited. :)