ASK GEORGE

Meta Description Joomla

The description of my website appears incorrectly on Google; however, on Yahoo! it appears correct. Can anyone tell me why or how to correct this on Google - I am using Joomla.

GEORGE'S REPLY

Google uses a few ways to display a website description:
1. It uses your meta description, which is encoded on the page itself
2. It uses an algorithm when it crawls your website to make a short, relevant description
3. It uses the DMOZ directory description of your site

The best thing to do is to write your own description. That description needs to be added to a "meta tag" which goes into the head tag of the home page.

If you like the Yahoo! description you can copy and paste that one.

If you want to check if your website has a meta description, go to your homepage, right click, and "view source". Then search that window for "description".

Once you have a meta description up, you need to let Google know that they should ignore the other sources of descriptions and use your meta description instead. To do that you need to put another meta tag on the page, this one is specific to Google.
<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

Keep in mind it will take some time for the update to take hold; depending on how often Google bot comes to the site.

If you want to know more about how Google is crawling your website you should sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (free). It gives a lot of good data that you don't get in Google Analytics. In order to access this tool, follow the link below.

Google Webmaster Tools >>