Does Google Cheat?
Hello Everybody. I would like to ask if somebody has an experience checking rankings incognito in different engines. The story is:
DuckDuckGo search engine:
My website's WordPress page:
Google's incognito window with the different results:
I thought that the description must be the same for all engines, especially when keywords go in the first or second sentence. As you see, in Google the description is different from original in WordPress, when I wrote this blog.
My questions are:
Did I something wrong?
It supposed to be in this way?
If Google can change the description, we can not use keywords in a proper way for ranking.
Thanks for reading and answers. All the best:)
Recent Comments
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Google is king. They do what they want to I guess. We are just the peons doing the work on our sites. Lol.
Hmm, maybe I am too stubborn to accept this fact. Anyway, for some members, Google works in an efficient way, let's do not lose patience. All the best:)
Who knows what evil lurks in the mind of Google? Only those who don't take them too seriously.
I know that it is a complicated deal with rankings from Google. However, I am happy that I got answers from wonderful members of WA. Cheers:)
Hi Nemira, there is nothing unusual here. Google is only doing what they publicly say.
They show different snippets for different users simultaneously. So this is all normal. They change title, meta description, and sometimes even url (yes you are reading correctly, they put tags in url), I have blogged about it a few times and also wrote about it in a training..
See here Meta parameters in WordPress Google continuously changes meta title and meta description
Thank you very much Jovo. I can take it easy now. I guess that I skipped some of your blogs.All the best:)
P.S. I wonder if it means that when Google shows different snippets for different people that the same blog will be every time with different description depending who searches for information?
I too am curious as to what others say.
I stopped regularly checking my rankings a while back and decided to focus on writing quality content. When I was overly concerned about rankings, my production of good content suffered because I was distracted.
I think that there is no reason to worry so much about rankings but when you write just for yourself, one day it becomes the boring activity. Cheers:)
I don't really write for myself. I figure out the most important keywords that the people I want to help are searching for.
I then focus on quality content that will help those people. I simply don't spend a lot of time worrying about where I am showing up in the rankings on any given day. Ultimately, Google is rewarding people that have great, useful content.
Potential customers commenting, emailing or texting is what I am most concerned about.
Good for you:) When talking about writing for yourself I had in mind me. I have many articles but my customers on summer vacation now I guess:) All the best:)
Hi, unfortunately you can not control what search engines use the the search results, you can only try and influence it
Search engine results are not an exact science
You did not do anything wrong
Barry
Thank you, Barry, for the answer. Yes, I must look for methods how to influence them because they are not predictable in this case at all.
All the best, be wealthy and healthy:)
Google treats your meta description as just a suggestion. It can, and sometimes does, ignore the text you've entered in that field and pulls some other text from the page contents. (It is using a portion of the text from the page that's being shown, isn't it?)
[added]
From google itself (emphasis mine):
"The description attribute within the <meta> tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description."
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624
Thanks, Bob. It seems as the play between cat and mouse because first sentences are rich with keywords and it would help for visitors to see what it is about. I first time saw the situation as this. Thanks a lot, all the best:)
P.S. I wonder how to know when will be this "sometimes" and how often?
I don't know that there's any way to tell. I don't know that google typically pulls content from the opening paragraph or from farther down the page. Was content from your post's opening paragraph used?
It appears that the other search engines are more consistent in their use of the meta description text.
Yes, it was from the first paragraph, the third sentence. They skipped words which describe supplement and left just plain talking about life:)
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The other question is. If Google changes wording to increase your chances of climbing in ranking, that's fine. But if the changes they make are not to your own advantage, then that would be really naughty and worth challenging.
Giulia
There's nothing to challenge -- Google can chosse to use your meta description or it can just as easily choose not to. The decision is entirely at the discretion of Google and its algorithms.