Grey text pre-pended to my meta description in Google search results

Grey text pre-pended to my meta description in Google search results - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, meta-description, to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Grey text pre-pended to my meta description in Google search results.Problem :

I updated the meta description for a site that I made for a friend of mine a few weeks ago and a Google search is just now reflecting my changes. However, there is a slightly greyed-out prefix to the description that says "63 schools-" and I cannot find any information about how to influence this section of the description. The text "63 schools" does appear in my page twice within p tags so I know where it comes from.

It appears that usually it is a date on websites that have dated posts, but my site's content doesn't merit that clarification and I would like it to be removed entirely.

I would appreciate and insight on how to direct Google to remove this, or at least change it to something that has meaning in the context of my description.

Image for clarification:

Solution :

Google not only displays dates like this, but it can also display number of items.

I work on an eCommerce site and for our category pages it displays a grey prefix in the serps such as 359 items.

This is only included as text at the top of the category pages, it isn't in the page titles or meta descriptions, it doesn't have any special formatting and isn't included in schema. So Google must look for an indication of the number of items listed on a page, and can show it as a special prefix.

I think in your case, Google is just mistaking the number 63 in your content, for the number of items on the page.

There is no special way to get this from stop displaying like that in the serps, so yes, I suggest experiment with editing the text to see if it gets removed. (maybe remove the two instances of it in the content, or change the wording slighty)

If the issue about seo, google-search, meta-description, is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.