How to get a description to show in google

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  cgrant · Member · Oct 7, 2009 at 3:56 pm

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  I read a bunch of posts and see that this is not a support site for google and I understand that. What I don’t understand is why my blog would be producing no description while other sites from wordpress obviously do. From the other postings it sounds there may not be a meta description tag in my theme, but then I also read that google doesn’t really use those. I also read that google pulls the first 150 chars. I tried putting a sticky post up to have that pulled but still nothing. I have good placement (search for Christopher Grant) but no description. If this is an issue with the theme, are there themes that seem to play better with google?

  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Oct 7, 2009 at 4:16 pm

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  WordPress.COM does not vave meta keywords or meta descriptions in the head of any theme. That said, because of the fact that our posts, if we tag and categorize them, are listed on the wordpress.COM global tags pages, we get a lot of search engine juice off of them.

  With sites I have set up with meta descriptions, sometimes the search engines will use them and sometimes they will not. It seems completely random – especially with google. On one author’s website I set up, instead of using the meta description for the blurb in one of the single pages describing one of their books, google chose instead to use the ISBN number, the price, the number of pages and the fact that it was a hardcover. In the page, all that information is at the very bottom of the book description.

  Google is synonymous with WTF?

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  husdal · Member · Oct 7, 2009 at 4:22 pm

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  WordPress.COM does not vave meta keywords or meta descriptions in the head of any theme.

  Correct. But for posts you can use the excerpt field as a meta description. As thesacredpath said, meta descriptions don’t always work. In my case, more often than not, they do.

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  cgrant · Member · Oct 8, 2009 at 1:20 pm

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  The description seems to be showing up now. I’m not sure what it was, but I’m guessing it was the sticky post with the excerpt. It may have just taken longer to update than I had hoped.