SEO Description displaying wrong for Home & Product pages on Google

[Kevin110]

My description that is displayed on Google for my home page and product pages is my footer information. It's not displaying the SEO description that I wrote for the home page and for each product like it used to.

It displayed the correct descriptions for years now but now it's not anymore. I have my sitemap submitted and search console says it gets crawled pretty much every other day with no issues. Any idea on how to fix this? Collection page SEO descriptions are showing up fine on Google. Below are screen shots. www.alilang.com

The only code change I've done recently did was I made my header sticky for my debut theme with this guide: https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Sticky-Fixed-Header-and-Navigation-for-Debut-Theme/td...

I deleted the sticky header code for a week and the issue still persisted so I don't think this code change in theme.scss or theme.js was the cause. 

[Kevin110]

Bumping. Any ideas on why this is happening?

[PageFly-Richard · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kevin110, 

Google explicitly said in various documents that "Google will sometimes use the <meta> description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. " 

Basically, they can rewrite your meta description, if they find the current meta description not relevant enough. A report from Search Engine Journal showed that Google rewrites meta description for pages over 70% of the time (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rewrites-meta-descriptions-over-70-of-the-time/382140/#) 

So how can you show your own meta description - the best way is to just follow Google's instruction: 

• Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description.
• Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. 
• Include clearly tagged facts in the description. 

  <meta name="Description" content="Written by A.N. Author Illustrated by V. Gogh, Price: $17.99, 
  Length: 784 pages">

  In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.
• Programmatically generate descriptions. 
• Use quality descriptions. 

You can check out the full guideline here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/good-titles-snippets 

Another thing you can do to enrich your Search Engine Appearance is to implement Rich Snippets for your sites - Rich Snippets look like this: 

You can learn more about Rich Snippets and how to implement them here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/rich-snippets/ 

Let me know if my answer is of any help - with a thumb up or like 😄 

Cheers 

[Propelguru]

The most popular explanation Google displays a different meta summary than the one you presented is that they believe their snippet is superior (for that search, for that user).

Google's goal is to help users find the appropriate content to answer their questions and solve their problems. If your meta descriptions aren't doing an excellent job of this, Google can display something else.

There is, unfortunately, nothing you can do if Google tries to alter, ignore, or view anything other than your defined meta definition. The best advice we can offer is to change the descriptions

There are some points you should check if these could be the reason for showing different descriptions.

• The meta description tag is missing or broken
• A meta robots tag is disabling the meta description
• Search engines ignored your preferred meta description
• Google's cache is outdated
• Sometimes, Google may show a different meta description because of technical issues with your website.

[Kevin110]

No. The descriptions are still wrong but I guess it's just Google's algorithm doing its work. Richard's response explains it