Technote

(troubleshooting)
Internet search results for website displays default META information
Problem(Abstract)
You search for your site on an external search engine. The result that comes back lists the description of your site as the default one, for example :

"Visit the largest online retail store of apparel. Shop the wide selection in activewears, jeans, pants, shorts and accessories for men and women."

You view the HTML source from the browser on your store, and you see a meta tag like this in the <head> tag,

<meta name="description" content="Visit the largest online retail store of apparel. Shop the wide selection in activewears, jeans, pants, shorts and accessories for men and women." />
Symptom Cause The META tag used when rendering the HTML page is pulled from the catalog being used on the site. If the default value still shows, the CATALOGDSC.LONGDESCRIPTION has not been updated for your catalog. Resolving the problem Update the CATALOGDSC.LONGDESCRIPTION for your catalogs. The description should reflect the true description of your live production site. This description will be used in the META tag on the rendered pages of your store.

To update the description, run the following SQL statement:

update CATALOGDSC set LONGDESCRIPTION = "<newDescription>" where CATALOG_ID = <catalogId>

where <newDescription> is the correct description, and <catalogId> is the catalog appearing in the URL when you access the store.

Restart the server or refresh the registry for the changes to take effect..

It will take time for search engines to re-crawl and re-index your site, building a new cached version, before you will see the change when you search for your site.
 

Document Information

Current web document: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21297554