What has Google done?
After the recent page rank update and the update to Google’s interface we have noticed that several shopping sites, including Amazon and Play have been badly affected by having really nasty looking meta descriptions.
I initially noticed this issue while doing weekly checks on a clients site and noticed that visits had dropped slighty for certain keywords. So I ran a quick search and found something weird had happened to their listing on the search engine results page. Google had placed ‘Product 1 – 7 of 7 – ‘followed by the sites defined meta description. I immediately checked the meta descriptions on the page and had one of our developers look at the code, he could notice anything that immediately stood out.
So I then went on to search Google using the string ‘inurl:.cart.php?m=product_list’ and found 100s of pages that have been affected by the same issue! This tells me that this is not an isolated incident.
My colleague John McCollum, a developer here at 360innovate, discovered that it was also happening to Amazon. We then went on to find that it’s also affecting Play and Argos – there are examples at the bottom of this post.
Now, we understand why this would happen if you didn’t specify a meta description, or if your meta description was not relevant enough to the content of the page. But most of the sites we have found have had proper meta descriptions in place, so there is no reason for Google to add in this information before the listing.
I am unsure if this update was intentional or not, some people might argue that it is to add value to the result and provide additional information to the searcher about the number of products on the page. If this is Google’s intention the it should read a lot better and say something like ’10 products -’ followed by the meta description. Not “Product 1 – 7 of 7 -” followed by the meta description.
Examples:
Gordon Campbell
