Google Plus Share Button not showing description tags... an Unannounced Google Platform change?

Asked 13/7, 2013 at 15:50 Answered 16/8, 2013 at 7:10

OK guys, tell me what I am doing wrong... Is this a new Google Plus issue? Or — to use an old Facebook term I created — an Unannounced Platform Change? (note the date of this question)

Please Note that I'm asking about Google Plus Share Buttons, not the GP+1 like button which is a different beast…

The Description Tag is not passed thru to the share window or to the Google Plus page post. If you inspect the Google window code with Firebug, you will see this:

<div class="Zm"></div>

…which is where the description tag should display.

Demo and source code located here.

Now...

The demo and the more complex script are both HTML5 validated. I have tested this with both schema.org tags and open graph tags: All Tags work fine in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool here. Results are the same in both cases: description tag does not display, so that's not the problem.
I have tested this on http:// and https:// with the same results: description tag does not display, so that's not the problem.
I have tested this on FF22.0 with and without AdBlockPlus && Chrome 28.0 and the results are the same: description tag does not display, so that's not the problem.
I have tested different button types with the same results: description does not display, so that's not the problem.
And I have googled for hours… and cannot find any "current links" to this issue that are not simple code errors.

So what part of this am I missing?

Any ideas, comments, suggestions or solutions would be greatly appreciated!

Frogman answered 13/7, 2013 at 15:50 Comment(3)

I am also facing the same issue.Post feedback using support.google.com/plus/answer/1678224?hl=en – Inaction 20/7, 2013 at 14:9

may be this is usefull #16956757 – Inaction 20/7, 2013 at 14:13

Thanks for that link... DD... I've been pulling my hair out for a week... now if we could find a google link and make this officially a "UPC" we all can move to other things..... – Frogman 20/7, 2013 at 16:56

Google+ dropped the shared page's description.

You can find indications of that by looking at the "Basic Page" example at https://developers.google.com/+/web/share/ which used to show a description until several weeks ago. The current status of Google documentation clearly shows that a "description" is not expected or used anymore.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Share demo: Basic page</title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <g:plus action="share"></g:plus>
  </body>
</html>

So, the only important tags are:

the "page title",
and — optionally — the "canonical link" (for SEO reasons).

That's it!

Obviously, Google downgraded website descriptions to less relevant in Google+ just like they did in their search engine a long time ago.

Most probably this was done for the same reasons Google once started to put less emphasis on the description of pages in their Search Engine product too: to avoid spam and keyword stuffing from polluting their Google Search and Google+ products.

For additional, "official" reference that Google generally marked descriptions to be "less important" a long time ago, check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1 which states in the section "Create good meta descriptions":

...Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content...

Well, "sometimes" obviously does not include Google+ (anymore) and — to be honest — I see their point. After all, you can (and should) "describe" the link in your Google+ post textarea yourself… which would also be the most logic thing to do: tell your users why the linked website is worth visiting instead of relying on a site's description.

Stipendiary answered 22/7, 2013 at 14:31 Comment(2)

Thank you for your post here... the last update on Google docs here developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/?hl=en is June 12, 2013...the other thing that has me scratching my head is why there is not more user 'noise' about this UPC... I understand your point about descriptions and search engines.... but do not see the correlation with pages as "rich content" has been the trend with "pages" for everybody... (fb, twitter, etc...). from the Google docs link above..."These requests do not honor robots.txt or other crawl mechanisms because this is a user-initiated request." – Frogman 23/7, 2013 at 9:3

@BillWarren I'm not Google, so I can't explain their reasoning. To be honest: ever since they killed Google Reader in favor for G+, I have stopped searching for potential logic behind Google's decisions. From what I'm seeing, they are shrinking back to their core business (advertising) and dumped whatever they wanted in the past few months. To name just a few: Google Weather API, Google Reader, Google Latitude, etc. Among these changes, who cries out loud about changes related to description tags at G+? I mean, they never warned us about their near-to-weekly G+ interface updates either… ;) – Stipendiary 23/7, 2013 at 10:50

You can use Google Snippet via meta tags to inform google what to display when your link is shared... You can view details @ https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/ (Customize the snippet people see when your page is shared. Using this tool, you can generate code for your page that indicates the images and text that best represent what's being shared.)

<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

<!-- Add the following three tags inside head. -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="Title For Example.com">
<meta itemprop="description" content="Sample Description For The Article..">
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/1.jpg">

Hope this helps.

Dejected answered 16/8, 2013 at 7:10 Comment(0)

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