Meta descriptions for specific categories/tags not showing?

[jessicamcdaniel]

Hi -- I'm really confused as to why only certain blog categories are not able to be crawled for their descriptions when their source codes look identical to other, crawlable pages on the same site?

Specifically, Moz/other tools are not able to pull a meta description from the page http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/premises-liability-videos (and a few others) - while the source code looks almost identical to http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/federal-torts-claims-act-videos ??

Can anyone shed some light into possible issues for me? Thanks in advance!

[DonnaDuncan]

That's odd. Is there a theme conflict? If I was you I'd want to understand root cause. You don't want future theme or plugin updates overriding your fix and putting you back in the same place.

[jessicamcdaniel]

Thank you for your answer, Donna! I actually believe it was a coding issue

Yoast was coding the descriptions as meta property="og:description" only. It looks like Moz and many other tools only consider meta name="description" as the proper code (even if og:description was included).

If anyone else is having a similar issue, what I had my team do is make sure to amend the autofilled snippets descriptions provided by Yoast (which they should have been doing anyways). Editing the autofilled descriptions adds the meta name="description" HTML needed. No more missing meta description errors!

[DonnaDuncan]

Moz and other tools aren't able to pull the meta description? I can see the meta description when I view that page using the Moz toolbar. It also gets picked up when I scan the site using screaming frog.

Do you mean it's not displaying as expected in search results? If yes, that sometimes happens b/c Google chooses other content from the page to display if it thinks it's more relevant.

Oleg's observation is a valid one if only part of the meta description is getting picked up and displayed in search results. I've seen that many times. Here's what the Moz Meta Description resource page says about meta description limitations (about 3/4 of the way down the page):

"Quotes Cut Off Descriptions

Any time quotes are used in a meta description, Google cuts off the description. To prevent meta descriptions from being cut off, it's best to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. If quotation marks are important in your meta description, you can change them to single quotes rather than double quotes to prevent truncation."

Also, if the meta description is too long (cutoff somewhere in the 150-160 character range), it will get truncated. Your specific example is 156 characters.

Does that help? If not, please elaborate and perhaps some different insights will be shared.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

My guess is the apostrophe (') in the meta description that is causing the issue. Check out your other pages that don't have the meta description indexed.