Search engine uses old meta description

November 30, 2007 9:28 AM

Why does my site keep showing up on search engines with out of date met descriptions and keywords?

I'm setting up a website for my parents' small press, using Joomla as a CMS. Here it is. http://www.beautifulozarks.com

However, whenever you search beautiful ozarks on Yahoo or Google, you get the the generic Joomla meta description "Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" instead of the new meta description "Ozark books and photographs on Ozarks history, travel, nature, the Irish Wilderness, and folk culture by Leland & Crystal Payton published by Lens & Pen Press."

It has been several days since I updated the meta description and keywords. Why don't the search engines use the new description? What am I doing wrong?

posted by clockworkjoe to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I would suspect that it will take longer than "several days" for the search engines to pick it up.
posted by HuronBob at 9:47 AM on November 30, 2007

Google and Yahoo don't crawl websites instantly. The more unpopular your site is, the less often it will be crawled.
posted by HotPatatta at 9:48 AM on November 30, 2007

Read this from Google.
posted by HotPatatta at 9:49 AM on November 30, 2007

More from google's site:

"How often will Google crawl my site?

Google's spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index. Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.

Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site."

If this is a new site, without a high page ranking and not many links to it, it might be a while...
posted by HuronBob at 9:49 AM on November 30, 2007

Several days?

Complain after a few months.
posted by rokusan at 10:20 AM on November 30, 2007

When I updated my personal site, it took at least a month for the Google and Yahoo indexes to completely rebuild their indexes for my site. If you create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google, you are more likely to be updated faster.
posted by gemmy at 4:48 PM on November 30, 2007

Seconding the sitemap. Use Google's tool to generate a sitemap, either from a URL list or your site's logs. When I did this on a couple of my sites, for the next couple days they were crawled so hard my host threatened to ban the Googlebot.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 11:33 AM on December 1, 2007