My Site Tanked - and SEO Description Got Stuffed Up?

I need help. I was position #1 and nr #3 for some highly competetive keyword that was making me a good income each day. A few weeks back that ranking dropped, and I couldn't find my rankings anywhere. I am now on page 10 for the keyword. But here's the strange thing... ...instead of showing my keyword optimized description for that page, it's just showing the beginning of the article as my description on google. Why is this? It used to show me the optimized description, now it's not.

Hi it's usually because your site doesn't have my be you acedently delete it

Google will pick whatever description it thinks is most appropriate for your site. Most of the time it will use meta description if you have one, but if Google thinks there is text on your page that is more relevant to a user's search, it will use that snippet instead.

If your meta is keyword optimized, and you're penalized on that keyword (for whatever reason, bad link velocity or spammy backlinks), Google might be selecting a different description from your page itself because it won't show your penalized keyword-filled meta content.

This happens a lot more recently, I've even seen some title tag changes that are pretty interesting by Google.

The real thing you need to figure out is why you are losing rankings right now, and not your description.

What have you done differently recently?

Make sure to reindex your page and make sure your meta description is there and working. If it is not working install something that can help you to get your meta tags right so Google will index them again. Often fetching via Google Webmaster Tools and submitting to index will get your site crawled in very little time. Hope this works for your problem.

Thanks for the help guys.

phpbuilt said:

Google will pick whatever description it thinks is most appropriate for your site. Most of the time it will use meta description if you have one, but if Google thinks there is text on your page that is more relevant to a user's search, it will use that snippet instead.

If your meta is keyword optimized, and you're penalized on that keyword (for whatever reason, bad link velocity or spammy backlinks), Google might be selecting a different description from your page itself because it won't show your penalized keyword-filled meta content.

Click to expand...

OK. Interesting. Thanks for that m8. I'm guessing it could be due to bad link velocity then. Will try and sort that out and get back to you on how it works.

TheLinkGuy said:

This happens a lot more recently, I've even seen some title tag changes that are pretty interesting by Google.

The real thing you need to figure out is why you are losing rankings right now, and not your description.

What have you done differently recently?

Click to expand...

Good advice.

Well, what I have done differently Is that I stopped building links to it. Once I hit #1 and #3 I was making so much money off it that I kind of moved on and started working on other things... (stupid, I know!)

So I have now started building links to the page again, and I also worry that my backlink profile might be a bit over optimized so I am diluting it heavily.

iSynergy Media said:

Make sure to reindex your page and make sure your meta description is there and working. If it is not working install something that can help you to get your meta tags right so Google will index them again. Often fetching via Google Webmaster Tools and submitting to index will get your site crawled in very little time. Hope this works for your problem.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that.

I did what you said and checked the description and it's definitely in place. Furthermore I went into google webmaster tools and submitted the page for indexing.

Hopefully that will get it crawled in very little time as you said. Thanks for taking the time to lend a helping hand. Appreciate it iSynergy Media.

What phpbuilt said. And you can get recrawled/indexed if you keep adding new links -- andmaybe change something on that page so G has a reason to reindex it completely instead of just recrawling. Take a look at your link profile and content and if you need you can add high quality (PR4+) links with your domain name or other generic anchor text to make it look more natural and get back in the good grace of Google.