SERP display switching between normal meta description and 15+ items
-
The site, www.myrtlebeach.com has been having an issue with the way it displays in search results for the keyword "Myrtle Beach hotels". It is showing as a bulleted/itemized list similar to what's mentioned in this Moz article
I'll begin with a little background. When I started working with the site it would display in SERPs as:
Myrtle Beach Hotels - Reviews, Deals, & Photos - MyrtleBeach.com
www.myrtlebeach.com/hotels/
70+ items - Compare Lowest rates & see reviews on Myrtle Beach Hotels
from $76. Holiday Inn Club Vacations Myrtle Beach - South Beach offers a ...
from $27. Located among the south end Myrtle Beach hotels, Holiday Sands ...We did not want the site showing as an itemized list with 70+ items. We wanted it to show with the meta description we provided.
Our first attempt at getting the SERP to display our normal meta description was to simply change the meta description. That didn't work.Our second thought was to use pagination to reduce the number of items on the page. A few days after we implemented pagination we saw our normal meta description displaying in the SERP. Shortly after that we saw the SERP had reverted, but this time was showing 15+ items rather than 70+. This is when began seeing the SERP display change between a normal meta description and 15+ items.
In another effort to stop the 15+ items from displaying in SERPs, we added relevant blog content like "Top 10 Oceanfront hotels" and "Best Kid Friendly Hotels" to break up the hotel listings on http://www.myrtlebeach.com/hotels/. Again, our normal meta description displayed in the SERPs for the next few days, but shortly after reverted back to 15+ items. Since then we have been seeing the SERP switch between our normal meta description and 15+ items with no rhyme or reason. Because our listings are not using
-
, I'm not really sure why the site would be displaying this way.
Since I have been regularly monitoring the SERP for the keyword "Myrtle Beach hotels", myrtlebeach.com/hotels/ has ranked as high as 5 and as low as 10. I open an Incognito Window and I take screenshots almost daily. I then record how the site was displayed in the SERP and its rank. I also look at organic visits and a Value Per Entry metric I've created. (I looked at Value Per Entry to determine if someone seeing 15+ items was more apt to convert)
Average Visits on days with a normal meta description - 182
Average Visits on days with itemized 15+ description - 174Average Value Per Entry on days with a normal meta description - 131
Average Value Per Entry on days with itemized 15+ description - 120Average Rank on days with a normal meta description - 7
Average Rank on days with itemized 15+ description - 6This data shows that performance is better on days when the normal meta description is displayed regardless of rank.
I have linked 2 screenshots for reference. The 2-6-14 screenshot shows the SERP display with 15+ items and the 2-7-14 screenshot shows the SERP display with the normal meta description we provided.
My questions are:
1. How does Google determine if a site should display in SERPs with an itemized or bulleted list?
2. Is there something else I need to change on myrtlebeach.com/hotels/ to prevent it from displaying in SERPs with 15+ items?
-
-
I wish I had a good answer. When Google takes liberties with snippets, it's not always easy to sort out why. The first stop is usually making sure the query is in the META description and the description isn't too long, and you've got both of those covered. Two long shots, but easy to try:
(1) Add the NOODP Meta Tag (). Sometimes, it prevents not only descriptions from the Open Directory Project, but also Google taking liberties. Sometimes.
(2) Consider pulling your domain name out of the META description. You're saying "Myrtle Beach Hotels" twice in both the title and META descriptions, and it's possible that that looks very slightly spammy to Google. If you can, make the description slightly more natural - the length is about right.
Again, these are in no way guaranteed, but they're easy to try. I don't think tweaking the structure of the page is going to help. It's not Google recognizing the search results that's a problem - it's why they choose to rewrite. Unfortunately, we don't have a good handle on the why, at least in some cases.
-
Thanks Vadim,
I actually mentioned that same article in the beginning of my post. It helped me understand that
- and
-
Dr. Pete in this article should provide some answers, food for thoughts, and hopefully a suggestion:
http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets
Hope this helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is this Interactive SERP Feature Called?
Hi Mozers, The interactive SERP feature that appears when you're searching for hotels nearby. It lets you input specific dates and number of adults and then lists different hotels nearby, their ratings and where they are located on a map. Two questions: What is that called? How do hotels get pulled in? Schema? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
How much is the importance of grammar and formation of sentence in Meta Title and Description in SEO
We are having, say around 100 products, cakes to be specific, with different flavors, available in more than 100000 areas of 200 plus cities. Now to make it SEO friendly, we have an algorithm which creates a unique page for each cake name, with area name, and few keywords, so that if customer is searching for cake delivery in any specific area of specific city, the user will easily find the right page. Now the thing is - when creating such unique pages for different combinations of cake, city and areas, it is also creating some content. So we wanted to know how much is the importance given to Grammatically correct statement compared to incorrect statement in ranking a page. for example: there is 1Kg Chocolate Cake, available in Satellite Area of Ahmedabad city, which one of the following Page title will have higher ranking? Case A: Send 1Kg chocolate cake to satellite area ahmedabad online Case B: Online 1kg Chocolate Cake delivery in Satellite Ahmedabad In Case A: the statement contains all keywords, but there are some grammatical mistakes in formation of statement as well as Capital Characters are not used for Satellite (Area name) and Ahmedabad (City name) In Case B: the statement is grammatical proper, as well as capital characters are used for Area name and City name. Does all search engine also have their algorithm designed to analyze the grammatical structure of page title or it just scans the keywords? Thanks in advance. Team Midnightcake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | midnightcake1 -
_Styling in my SERP, why?_
So Google is using an tag for my SERP snippet and there is styling in that that uses _and for some reason that _is showing up in the snippet itself. So "blah, blah blah, _19.99 _blah" is what is being displayed. How do I prevent this from happening? I thought styling within the header tags was fine? So what I am trying to do basically: Adventure Bear 16 oz or Adventure Bear 1.1oz Is this allowed or am I making a terrible mistake here? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Chris Birkholm____0 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
Switching Url
I started working with a Roofer/Contractor about a year ago. His website is http://www.lancasterparoofing.com/. The name of his business is Spicher Home Improvements. He used to have spicherhomeimprovements.com, well he still does. He was focusing on Roofing and Siding but now would like to branch to other areas like Interior remodeling. So adding interior work under LancasterPaRoofing.com is not applicable. I do not think starting another domain and having two is the best option. I think he should go back to using SpicherHomeImprovements.com and I assume he would take a small hit but in time he should be better off. Plus the url is more applicable to the real name of his business. Thanks for any feedback I receive. Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChadEisenhart0 -
Essential items to consider when starting a new site in terms of SEO?
I've just launched a new site and have undertaken the following: Keyword friendly page titles Meta description Not a great deal of content on the site yet - but have a blog which we're trying to update as much as we can Analytics and Webmaster tools set up Dmoz submission Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page Google places set-up - waiting for postal pin I've signed up to here to help me to start building a link profile. However, would like to hear any more hints, tips or help on items I should be doing for a new site looking to move up rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | savageseo0 -
Is a separate title tags and description reqquired
is it a separate title tags and description for all pagination pages. We have common title tag and meta desciption of all pagination pages should we need to modify the same
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
Hello all, think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything. You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models. How would you make both of them live together in your website? If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions). In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome1