Two in a Room Studios

In an earlier post “Why doesn’t my site show up on Google?”, I mentioned how Google uses the meta description of a page for the description (or “snippet” in Google speak) that appears under links in the search results.

What may also happen is that Google uses an excerpt of text from your page that surrounds the search terms and combines them into its own snippet.

If Google cannot crawl your page for some reason and there is no meta description tag, your page snippet will be taken from the DMOZ Open Directory Project if available. You can prevent this by using the following meta tag in your pages

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

Here’s a detailed description of the process form Google Engineer Matt Cutts;