Strange listing results in Google - Meta Title and Meta Description disappeared?

[paulbeckett]

Hi all

My site has been listed on google for c. 6 years, always with good placement, and the search results have always displayed the Page Title and the Page Description.

Suddenly over the last couple of days many pages have started displaying a strange (cut-down) description.

For instance, if you search for "ted baker wallets" on google.co.uk we now appear on the first page like this:

Ted Baker Wallets - KJ Beckett
www.kjbeckett.com/acatalog/leatherwallets.html - Similar

Whereas we used to appear like this:

Wallet - KJ BECKETT - Men's Wallets, Leather Wallets by Ted Baker
Ted Baker Wallet - KJ BECKETT - Leather Wallets by Ted Baker - You've never enjoyed getting your designer wallet out so much! Ted Baker wallets are the epitome of ...
www.kjbeckett.com/acatalog/leatherwallets.html - Cached - Similar

Is anyone able to advise why this may be happening (or point me in the right direction)?

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[leehack]

Have your rankings changed or are they still the same?

[paulbeckett]

Have your rankings changed or are they still the same?

Possibily a very slight drop (in the short term)... maybe a place or two but nothing major.

[Mike Hughes]

I wonder if it's the second

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

that is appearing before the keywords and description meta tags. Maybe this is telling Google the header info has finished?

Is it a recent change?

Mike

[paulbeckett]

Thanks.

Is it a recent change?

No... we haven't done any significant changes on the layout for quite some time. That line would have been in the code for quite sometime.

The only notable changes we have done recenetly are:

1. Added Google Remarketing Tracking Code onto every page... about two weeks ago.

2. Changed our dedicated server (to a new provider)... over the last weekend.

[Mike Hughes]

2. Changed our dedicated server (to a new provider)... over the last weekend.

In which case I wouldn't be too surprised if it was just that Google has noticed everything has moved and isn't displaying page snippets or meta tags until it's had a chance to come back and reindex all the info. (i.e check that nothing has changed).

Mike

[paulbeckett]

Hi all... just tidying this thread up. The answer has been found.

When the new server went live it had the wrong robots.txt file in which was disallowing all pages on the site.

The error has been removed now but was in live for c. 2 weeks. In a seperate post I have aksed whether this error would have a long term impact on our Google placements ... we are still there at the moment (albiet without the meta data).