On the next page, I discuss the solution to this issue and go over some key takeaways for you from this case study. The lesson here is to be aware that if you decide to do something like this with your meta description, it will only show up properly in Google (and only for now, because Google may change things up later). Check out the results within Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Dogpile (+1 if you remember Dogpile, hahaha). Interestingly enough, none of the other search engines I tried parsed this meta description like Google. Still no change! At this point, I thought I should try searching for this site in a few other search engines just to see how they parse this particular meta description. Well, after developing an initial theory that Google automatically wraps two terms consisting of at least 27 characters followed by either a space or an underscore + a space (since each of the lines above end with a space, but also an underscore just before the space), a quick test of that theory via a page I created and waited for Google to cache proved false as seen below: Line 5: "WWWWW_WWW_WWWW_WWW_" (27 characters, no space on the end) 3 - When closely comparing the actual meta description to how it appears in Google, I noticed what appeared to be a pattern consisting of two main factors: The number of characters within each line and a space on the end of each line (except for the last line). Line 4: "WWWWW_W_W_W_W_ " (34 characters, including the space on the end) Line 3: "WWWWW_WWW_WWW_W_W_ " (31 characters, including the space on the end) Line 2: "WWWWW_W_W_W_W_ " (34 characters, including the space on the end) Line 1: "WWWWW_WWW_WWWW_WWW_ " (29 characters, including the space on the end) So how did they get it to wrap just like they wanted in Google? A closer examination shows that the characters in the meta description are spaced in the following manner: 2 - The total number of characters used in the description is 155 (if you look closely at the screen shot above and compare it to the actual meta description, you will see a period at the end which results from an addition made by Google and not from the actual meta description from the page). ![]() ![]() Pretty awesome (see: geeky) idea, I must say - but just how did they pull this off? Well, I decided to start chipping away at some ideas as to how they could have done it (and the answer ended up being a simple one, but here's to lessons learned from taking longer paths to resolution :) ), so here is a breakdown of my research:ฤก - If you visit the Web site and view their source code, here is their meta description: That's right! That company decided to forgo a keyword-rich description that would garner the attention of a search engine in place of an ASCII art description that would possibly garner the attention of a searcher.
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