Recently created a new blog and discovered some interesting things vis a vis G and the way it interprets the page for creating a description.
On many of my sites I'll have a description meta tag, and it will often mirror (though shortened) the starting main text of the page. When you have a description tag G will usually use it in the two-line summary under your page name in the SERPs.
I discovered though that G may be filtering page contents if it determines the page is a blog, and that the top-most text may be constantly changing because of new posts. In one case I did not set a description meta tag, believing G would find some text I had in the body. Instead, G skipped what appeared to it to be part of postings, and picked up the footer for the description!
The overall layout is like this:
Code:
heading
...
/heading
main body
columnar post structure
individual posts
...
/individual posts
/columnar post structure
sidebar structure
...
/sidebar post structure
/main body
footer
....
/footer
Looking at the HTML construction of the page I can see this could be a common issue with blogs. Many WordPress blogs use the same or similar class/ID names for the main DIV CSS components, and G may be trained to look for these. Anything within these DIVs will not be regarded for the purposes of descriptions and some other metadata.
There are a couple of things you can do:
1. Build in a description meta in the header.php for your blog. However, this means all your pages will have the same description meta.
2. Use an
SEO tool to provide distinct descriptions to each page type. Mostly useful for the main index and category pages.
3. Use some clever PHP to insert a text segment before the posts. This text appears above all your posts. Because it's outside the post DIVs, G will not see it as a post. You can use the isHome() statement to restrict the text to just your home page.
I didn't want to do #3 because I already have something similar in the sidebar. So in my particular case, I did #2, and I also replicated the text for the footer. So now, if G ignores the description meta for some reason, it'll still pick up what I want from the footer.
Linear Mode
