XF 2.2 SEO issue - meta description not being used by search engines?

[NealC]

My forum rvforums.com has a meta description yet when I go to various search engines (google, duckduckgo, bing) and do a search for "rv forum community" to see how I'm ranking I'm finding that the description paired with the link are various forum posts recently made and not the sites meta description. This is very unfortunate and not desired. Why is this happening. I check competitor sites and I'm not seeing that with theirs. Any help as to what's going on here or if this is a bug in the latest XF 2.2 release?

 

[Mr Lucky]

The meta description you set in options I think will only show on the home page (e.g. forum list).

For individual forums, if there is a description for a forum set in the node settings, that is used as the meta description for that forum.

Individual threads seem to have the first bit of text as the meta description (per page of the thread)

Google may or may not choose to show the meta description as the snippet though. That is the way it works, it seems you can't force it to use the meta description.

 

[djbaxter]

For one thing, the snippet Google displays is dynamic and dependent on the specific query used in generating the search results. A different search query may very likely display different snippets.

This is the new nature of search: it is not driven by pages but by search queries and the goal is to answer questions posed by the search query.