Changing Your Site's Title and Description in Search Results

How do I change my site's title and description in search results?

Watch a video on how Google displays search results.

Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Google uses a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, they may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results. Google displays meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. While they're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, they're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page.

Create good meta descriptions	Learn more...
Prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site	Learn more...

Create Good Meta Descriptions

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases where Google is less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information - price, age, manufacturer - scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

< meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages" >In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.

Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

Prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results

One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct Google not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages. To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

< meta name="robots" content="NOODP" >

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:

< meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP" >

If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:

< meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP, nofollow" >

Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index. If you're concerned about content in your title or snippet, you may want to double-check that this content doesn't appear on your site. If it does, changing it may affect your Google snippet after they next crawl your site. If it doesn't, try searching Google.com for the title or snippet enclosed in quotation marks. This will display pages on the web that refer to your site using this text. If you contact these webmasters to request that they change their information about your site, any changes to their sites will be recognized by the googlebot crawler on the following visit.