Niara: Where do search engine snippets come from?

[30knees]

I have the meta description field filled in but I see that search engines don't show this as the snippet in the search results. What is being shown is random. Some of it makes sense, other text not (eg a "thank you" from a reply to a review).

Edited May 6 by 30knees

[Yabber]

We have no influence on what google displays in the SERP, this is decided by google algorithms. If google's algorithms think the meta description doesn't match the content of the page, they reject it and take some content from the page. You have to experiment with the content of the meta description so that it pleases google.