: How to customize the site in search engine results? Is there a cross search engine solution to customize the name&description of a site in search engine results without it's explicit specifying

@Gretchen104

Your best bet are title and meta description tags. These will be used in most cases, although there can be exceptions.

Stack Overflow's description is most likely taken from DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Ask_an_Expert/Computers_and_Technology/). Google will sometimes use the description from DMOZ instead of the provided meta description or a Google-generated description.

Unfortunately, this behavior can not be controlled by the webmaster. In this example, Google probably decided to use the DMOZ description since Stack Overflow provides no meta description and the page itself also does not offer enough content to generate an adequate description.

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@Alves908

This is a really good question! However, the answer can be found relatively easily with a site:stackoverflow.com "A language-independent collaboratively" search.

The first thing you need to know:
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1

We use a number of different sources for this information, including
descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We
may also use publicly available information—for instance, anchor text
or listings from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)—or create rich
snippets based on markup on the page.


If a description meta tag is not found for a page, Google will look for a snippet in content or in other places. Much of the time, it depends upon upon the search query. Since this is clearly a brand search for a known brand, it is likely that a different set of criteria are applied as opposed to a term based search.

This SERP snippet comes from DMOZ.
www.dmoz.org/search?q=stack+overflow
See item #2 :


Stack Overflow - A language-independent collaboratively edited
question and answer site for programmers.


I did a few other searches and checked JavaScript and looked for mark-up, however, nothing showed up. The only place I found a source for the SERP snippet was DMOZ.

For what it is worth, it seems this question has been asked on StackOverflow: stackoverflow.com/questions/3796793/how-to-programmatically-provide-site-structure-and-url-path-to-google-search

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@Jennifer507

The Data that are displayed in the search results are based on Structured Data and you can learn more about it from the link below.
developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
If you are having a WordPress site, you can attain many of the features you want using the Yoast SEO plugin which can be downloaded from the official WordPress plugin store for free.

Let me know if my suggestions helped you.

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@Jessie594

No what you are asking unfortunately is not possible. The site description which is shown in search results isn't based on the description meta tag anymore, instead Google and other search engines use content from the page which the user can see as the description in search results. If you want description text your search engine results you need to have page content and ideally speaking based on SEO your search engine landing pages should be actual content pages on your site and not a homepage with nothing other than a forward link.

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