SEO Speedwagon

In scoping out a site redesign, a client asked me to take a look at a Google query for "Nike" - specifically to determine how Google was creating this descriptive text:

Apparel, shoes and accessories.

This client is pretty search-savvy, so I assumed he'd checked the Nike meta data, and he had. Nike sets a cookie, does a quick script-based geo-sniff test, then passes the user on to a page named main.html. Neither the root page nor main.html has meta description or keywords tags (or any crawlable text, for that matter), so he was stumped about where the description was coming from.

Not a lot of people know that Google sometimes pulls Open Directory Project (DMOZ) descriptions to use as descriptive text on results pages (and when I say sometimes, there's little predictability about it. More on this later.) In Nike's case, they seemed to luck into a nice, minimalist description that appears to have been written by an actual DMOZ editor. I doubt that anyone in Nike's e-Marketing wing is capable of such restraint.

So Nike got lucky here. Flash home page with immediate redirect to another full-Flash page, no meta data, but good descriptive snippet. The moral here? Check your DMOZ description in the off-chance that Google will use it to describe your site. And if you don't like your current description, request a change. Getting an existing description changed often happens much faster than getting your site accepted in the first place, provided you use your head and request something sensible.