Search Engine Results Lists

It’s me again, with more information about search engines and how they work. This time I’m looking at the search engine results pages (SERPs) … and how they come up with the descriptions that they use for your web pages.

Have you ever wondered how the search engines determine what to display on their results list pages describing your site? Sometimes it is an excerpt from your page content, although not always the same excerpt. Other times they grab the description meta tag information. And other times it seems to come out of nowhere.

So here is how it is done:

Google uses the description from the meta tag, if there is one. If the description meta tag is missing, they will use a sentence from the page that contains the searched keyword. And if the web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), Google sometimes uses the description in the DMOZ directory.

Yahoo uses a combination of the first part of the meta description tag’s content, along with a text snippet from the page containing the searched keyword. If there is no meta description tag, Yahoo will use the description from Yahoo’s directory. If there is no description in the directory either, Yahoo will just display relevant text snippets from the page.

MSN/Live uses the first sentence on the page that contains the searched keyword. If the searched keyword doesn’t appear on the page, they use the first sentence on the page. If a description exists in the DMOZ directory, MSN/Live will use that description.

So how do you take control of your description in the results list? Check back here for specific HTML tags for controlling your page’s results list description …

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