Google Descriptions

0Darren • 28th Jun 2009 • Uncategorized • dc, descriptions, dublin core, google, metadata, results, search

If you use the Dublin core meta standard on your website, you might assume that Google will publish your descriptions in its results – this is not the case.

In NI Government we’ve been using the DC standard for over 5 years. It was always my understanding that Google used description metadata in its results so I was puzzled when I recently noticed that NIDirect didn’t have the nice listing in Google results that I thought it might have. A bit of research didn’t get me anywhere other than a couple of instances where other users asked the same question.

So I searched to see what Google recommended and found the example made no reference to the DC standard. Fortunately NIDirect is a content managed site so I duplicated the dc.description tag with a normal description, left it a day and on reindexing the page Google picked up the new tag and now uses this in its results.

I find this odd that Google for some reason seems to have dropped support for DC metadata. Perhaps it never really did but I’d be grateful if anyone could shed some light on this. In the meantime, if you have a similiar problem, just create duplicate tags or remove the dc. prefix.