I publish an online newspaper about animal news in nyc. I recently rebuilt my site in dreamweaver and have just added meta tags to my homepage and that of the most recent article. When I do a google search the homepage description comes up with a leadin from an old article. Also when I tried posting the newest article in facebook the meta tag content description did not appear. Can someone tell me how I should correctly write the meta tag in the html so that it appears in google searches and when I post articles on facebook? Below are links to my homepage and the article discussed above, as well as how I wrote the meta tags in the html. Thank you in advance for all your help!
Best,
Michael
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>New York Companion</title>
<meta name="Description" content="The New York Companion is a New York City-based newspaper that exclusively reports animal news. Our mission is to advance animal welfare through promoting adoption, increasing awareness and encouraging resident involvement in animal welfare initiatives." />
<meta name="Keywords" content="Animal News" />
http://newyorkcompanion.com/sbpgs/2012/April/High%20Rise%20Syndrome.ht ml
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>New York Companion</title>
<meta name="Keywords" content="Animal News" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Every year, thousands of urban housecats fall from unprotected windows in a phenomenon known as High Rise Syndrome. So far this year the ASPCA has seen 26 cases, a nearly 45 percent increase compared with the same period last year. Mild weather could be to blame for the surge this spring. On average during the warm months, the ASPCA sees approximately three to five cases per week." />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.newyorkcompanion.com/sbpgs/2012/April/High%20Rise%20Syndrom e.html/<img src="../../../images/articles/2012/April/High Rise Syn_TS.jpg" />
Michael,
Breget is referring to the cache maintained by Google. You can't clear or update their cache - unfortunately, all you can do is wait for your site to get crawled (which can take a couple days), and once they have gathered your meta information, they will then update the description in their SERP (which can also take a couple days).
Interestingly, I looked for your article by searching "new york companion high rise syndrome" and the first result was THIS page!!! This points to another factor which is the more popular your site, the more often it is updated. I would recommend you take a look at Google's Webmaster Tools and do a bit of research into SEO - this should help clarify things more...
Good luck!
Jason
P.S. - It looks like your meta information was entered correctly.
Thank you Jason,
Yea I found a site late last night that laid everything out clearly and I was able to correct the meta info, the link is below.
http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/how-to-control-facebook-image-thumbnail- text-popup-dialogs/
Thanks for getting back to me and hopefully a week from now google will update the description.
Hope you have a great weekend!
Michael
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