Summary Text Question

1. 72

   Lisa HWposted 8 years ago

   I had a Hub that had what looked liked a "crummy" summary text, based on the automatic thing that happens if one doesn't write his own summary.  So, I changed it to something I thought would be better, and then the traffic went down.
   
   I've tried to change it back by selecting selecting the option (during editing) that I thought would return it to "automatic" (I forget what word is next to the box there).  I tried to delete my own text, and then did "done editing".  It looked to me like my text just showed up again once I went back to look and see if the previous, automatic, text showed up.
   
   So, the question is, can I make it go back to automatically generating the summary text - and how?

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2. 73

   starme77posted 8 years ago

   Happened to me a few times you just have to toy with it a bit - you'll get it

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3. 74

   girly_girl09posted 8 years ago

   I think the automatic text is simply the first 250 (could be more or less) characters of your hub. So, could you just copy and paste that text? Otherwise, I don't think I've ever tried reverting it back.
   
   Good luck!
   
   I'm also wondering if your traffic went down because you edited the page and perhaps it changed Google's indexing of your page...not 100% positive on this, but I vaguely remember hearing about this somewhere.

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   1. 72

      Lisa HWposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      girlygirl, thanks.   I thought I could do what you suggested (copy and paste the first few lines), but I couldn't make the window get rid of the most recent summary text.  It stayed there, the way it does when you click on "automatic".  I tried both "automatic" and "non-automatic" (checking and unchecking the boxes there), but nothing would get rid of it.  Then I went back later, to see if the system had changed anything back after I left; but, no.
      
      darkside, thanks.  I don't think I ran past 500 characters, but I also didn't realize there is that limit.  Maybe that's what was happening.

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      1. 81

         darksideposted 8 years agoin reply to this

         This is a webpage I uploaded that does a quick character count by copying and pasting your summary text and clicking the button.

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4. 81

   darksideposted 8 years ago

   If possible, I always go for an original summary. If traffic drops, it could be for a variety of factors. In the long run you're better off for it.
   
   And 500 characters is the limit.

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5. 47

   johnr54posted 8 years ago

   The summary is used to create the Meta "description" tag which is not used by Google in generating the search rankings but it is what is used to create the text under the title of the page in the search results, assuming that the summary text has the search terms in it. 
   
   So you can create a nice summary that encourages the click if well done, so it's usually better to use that that the random text Google will pull out that has the search term.

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