Google announced in a blogpost that it no longer uses DMoz listings for snippeting. As a result, it is now very important for the webmasters to provide high quality meta descriptions.
Google earlier took search result snippet from three places:
- The content of the page
- The meta description
- DMOZ listings
Page content is the best choice for the search result snippets as the content extracted from the pages is most relevant. Sometimes, however, content may not be the best source of a snippet. “For instance, when someone searches for a publishing company for their book, the relevant homepages in the result set may contain only a few images describing the businesses and a logo, and maybe some links, none of which are particularly useful for a snippet.”
If content doesn’t work, snippet is taken from the meta description which should describe the page in a few words. If there is not much content and no meta description, snippet was taken from Dmoz.
“With DMOZ now closed, we’ve stopped using its listings for snippeting, so it’s a lot more important that webmasters provide good meta descriptions, if adding more content to the page is not an option.”
