the big G has indexed over 400 useless pages

Is it normal that the g bot picks up useless content from my page and then adds a search result that looks like complete crap?

For instance, one search shows an indexed half of my site's slogan and half of the title of a paragraph in the title, and the disclaimer in the description.

I don't know who in the world would ever click on that, and there are countless others like it. Can anyone tell me what is happening here? - I'll be glad to address any other questions that help attain a solution.

Whoops, Wrong thread

use a html meta description tag to tell google what to display

i thought the big G disregarded title and description tags because of the things people do on this forum

They disregard the description for ranking your site, but they still use it as the description for your site

what about the keyword meta tag?

imperial109 said:

i thought the big G disregarded title and description tags because of the things people do on this forum

Click to expand...

Here's their stand on meta descriptions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_JzvjmYPuU

so its back to the whole unique content thing agian...

What would you recommend doing for a site that can have 1 paragraph descriptions for each page. They would be unique, but it would still contain more characters than allowed in the results description. But would it matter if it's in the meta description and the body so that users can see it too?

The G results only show the meta description text when the search term does not get a close match in the body of the page. Since you can't control what the searcher will type, you can't assume that the meta description text will be shown.

The meta description is not used for ranking, so use it to make your link very compelling to click when seen in a page of search results. However, it has an indirect effect on ranking. If your text is compelling and lots of people click it, the algorithm makes note of your popularity and takes it into consideration.

However, if a clicker looks at your page and bounces, that is, uses the backspace key to go back to the SERP and clicks another result, this is also noted by the algo and this counts against your page. That means your page didn't satisfy the visitor, so it isn't a relevant result.

As for the indexing of useless pages, you can try to block them via Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt combined.