Links Vertical Card Data Source (GCSE)

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1

Hi team,

A client of mine has asked us for help in editing the description in a result card in the Links vertical. The client uses GSCE for their 3rd party Links vertical, and I am wondering if this is something we are able to assist with as it appears to be a snippet of a section on a page on their corporate site that is not being formatted correctly in Answers (basically a superscript on their page is showing as a normal character in Answers results which is confusing to read).

My initial hunch was that we are using the meta title and meta description on that linked page, but a quick SEO Quake test showed that the description we’re showing in Answers is not the same as the meta description. When I search for this page in Google, I’m seeing a snippet with the correctly tagged meta title and description (which differ from the Answers result card).

Where is the data in the result card coming from, and can we influence it?

Thanks for the help!
Sano

2

Hi Sano,

While the meta title and meta description of a page do affect what Google pulls in as the description for search results, Google is actually automatically generating snippets to use as the description, which means we cannot influence it for Answers. Check out this article from Google on guidelines for how to improve the quality of displayed page titles and snippets.

That being said, the Links vertical is meant to serve as a fallback option when structured results from the Knowledge Graph are minimal or non-existent (which is a great opportunity to add to the KG!). We recommend making sure there is content here the client would like to direct their users to instead.

Best,
Kristy