I have a Javascript greeting that greets new users with a drop down banner like SO has. It only becomes visible after 3 seconds and when the X is clicked it disappears. Since I have not put meta description tags, on every page Google shows that greeting as the meta data. I dont understand why Google is using this seeing as it is not loaded staight away, will this stop happening if i use meta description?
Should I use Meta desciption? On the upside it might help this problem, but then Google wont be able to dynamically fetch data from the site (which happens to be a forum). It so happens that it is doing this anyway and I dont know why?
Thanks!
My best guess is the text from your greeting is being added to the page (a wordpress plugin?) on the server side as visible (so it appears even if javascript is disabled), hidden by javascript on pageload, then just being shown after 3 seconds (i.e. it is really there already and as such is the first major text google finds).
Try changing your greeting plugin/code to generate the div containing the greeting message after page-load, or at least to append it to the end of the document (or apply
style="display:none;"as an inline-style so Google can see it) on the server-side then tweak the js to show it. It would no longer greet visitors with js disabled, but would also allow google to reach your main content without encountering the greeting.