Google Plus Share Button not showing description tags... an Unannounced Google Platform change?
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://andhttps://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!
Answer
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.