Really Neat Idea: Using ASCII Art Within A Meta Description!

UPDATE 6/8/2011: The site I use as the example in this post appears to have dishonestly taken the idea from seomofo.com and claimed it as their own. I put too much into this post to alter all of its contents accordingly, so this update will have to suffice as the caveat that SEOMofo should be considered in place of dxbseo throughout this post.

Talk about nailing down Google’s formatting of a meta description in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)! I recently stumbled upon what is easily the coolest meta description I’ve ever seen (along with a page title, the meta description is typically (but not always) what Google will show searchers when your site appears in a SERP). While it holds absolutely no value for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it’s certainly a unique way to grab the attention of a searcher where attention may otherwise not have been grabbed. Check this out (click the image to actually see the result in Google):

That’s right! That company decided to forgo a keyword-rich description that would garner the attention of a search engine in place of an ASCII art description that would possibly garner the attention of a searcher. Pretty awesome (see: geeky) idea, I must say — but just how did they pull this off? Well, I decided to start chipping away at some ideas as to how they could have done it (and the answer ended up being a simple one, but here’s to lessons learned from taking longer paths to resolution ), so here is a breakdown of my research:

1 - If you visit the Web site and view their source code, here is their meta description:

<meta name=”description” content=”WWWWW___WWW____WWWW____WWW__ WWWWW__W_________W________W____W_ WWWWW___WWW____WWW____W_____W_ WWWWW________W___W________W____W_ WWWWW___WWW____WWWW____WWW_” />

2 - The total number of characters used in the description is 155 (if you look closely at the screen shot above and compare it to the actual meta description, you will see a period at the end which results from an addition made by Google and not from the actual meta description from the page). So how did they get it to wrap just like they wanted in Google? A closer examination shows that the characters in the meta description are spaced in the following manner:

Line 1: “WWWWW___WWW____WWWW____WWW__ ” (29 characters, including the space on the end)

Line 2: “WWWWW__W_________W________W____W_ ” (34 characters, including the space on the end)

Line 3: “WWWWW___WWW____WWW____W_____W_ ” (31 characters, including the space on the end)

Line 4: “WWWWW________W___W________W____W_ ” (34 characters, including the space on the end)

Line 5: “WWWWW___WWW____WWWW____WWW_” (27 characters, no space on the end)

3 - When closely comparing the actual meta description to how it appears in Google, I noticed what appeared to be a pattern consisting of two main factors: The number of characters within each line and a space on the end of each line (except for the last line). Well, after developing an initial theory that Google automatically wraps two terms consisting of at least 27 characters followed by either a space or an underscore + a space (since each of the lines above end with a space, but also an underscore just before the space), a quick test of that theory via a page I created and waited for Google to cache proved false as seen below:

Here’s the exact meta description I used for that test (140 characters total):

<meta name=”description” content=”Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious_ Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” />

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is comprised of 34 characters (which is an exact match for the number of characters in line 4 of the meta description we’re researching), so if it were simply a matter of character count followed by either a space or an underscore followed by a space, then the meta description above should have wrapped, but it didn’t. Hmm, interesting. The next thing I tried was to remove the underscores on the end of the meta description on lines 2, 3, and 4. My thought was perhaps that would disrupt the pattern. Here are the results of that test:

Still no change! At this point, I thought I should try searching for this site in a few other search engines just to see how they parse this particular meta description. Interestingly enough, none of the other search engines I tried parsed this meta description like Google. Check out the results within Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Dogpile (+1 if you remember Dogpile, hahaha). The lesson here is to be aware that if you decide to do something like this with your meta description, it will only show up properly in Google (and only for now, because Google may change things up later).

On the next page, I discuss the solution to this issue and go over some key takeaways for you from this case study.

Page 2: Case Study Conclusion and Takeaways…  »