: Google is not picking up meta description approximately 50 percent of the time on our website We have a valid description meta tag on our website. We recently updated it. Temporarily we included

@Murray155

If all your page titles are too similar, they may also choose to use the text from somewhere else on the page. Make sure all the pages have different descriptions, and that description relates to other content on the page so that it is seen as relevant to what the page is about.

Also:


3 days doesn't seem long. You've told them that the site needs crawling again, not to crawl it again now. If you click "cached" next to your URL in the listings, it will give a date of the version in their database. Crawl stats in webmaster tools will also let you know when they were last on your site.
Meta descriptions do need character encoding to validate (whilst good coding practise, I'm actually quite surprised that Google ignore the rest of the tag based on this - encoding the tag may not actually be what made Google change their listings, even if it seemed that way)


I believe you could only remove sections of text from their listings by cloaking it, which would run the risk of your site looking like spam, so I would not do that.

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