Structured Data + Meta Descriptions
-
Hey All,
Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit.
"Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.
"
This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions. Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?
-
JStrong,
Just to make sure we're all on the same page: Although Google uses the phrase "Structured Data..." I don't think they mean it in the same was as you would use, for example, Schema markup in the code. The example there is simply a meta description, which you can use for whatever purpose you like. It could be worth testing the Click-Through-Rate on meta descriptions like that (a metric you can see in Google Webmaster Tools) to decide if you want to use it, though for my money I'd bet on a description with a clear value proposition, offer, call to action, emotion, etc... that will also have their keywords bolded if they appear in the description.
If you do test it out please share what the effect on CTR in the SERPs was from GWT. Just because I'm curious.
-
Very interesting! I don't recall seeing that before but I checked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine entry for that URL and the quoted extract has been there since at least 2013.
Elsewhere Google has been pretty insistent on structured data being part of the document itself as much as possible so it does seem somewhat contradictory advice. As you say perhaps they've simply forgotten to update that particular entry to reflect current thinking.
-
Hi Alex,
Ah, so something older then? This is where I saw the information. I thought Google was usually pretty good about removing outdated information, but maybe not in this case. I agree, that I have previously only worked with and seen structured data in the body markup, so not sure if this was a more recent development or not.
Thanks for the input!
-
Once upon a time it was possibly a good use of the meta description to include some salient structured data but today we have a proper way of marking up structured data. The meta description is best used for compelling, relevant copy to attract the user to click through to your site as the meta description is your one best hope of affecting what is shown to the user in the SERPs.
Search engines haven't shown any inclination to parse the meta description and I doubt they would do so in future. Structured data belongs in the document itself, marked up accordingly.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta robots
Hi, I am checking a website for SEO and I've noticed that a lot of pages from the blog have the following meta robots: meta name="robots" content="follow" Normally these pages should be indexed, since search engines will index and follow by default. In this case however, a lot of pages from this blog are not indexed. Is this because the meta robots is specified, but only contains follow? So will search engines only index and follow by default if there is no meta robots specified at all? And secondly, if I would change the meta robots, should I just add index or remove the meta robots completely from the code? Thanks for checking!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?
Hi all, One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain). The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example: Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A. We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different? So: The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ Thanks in advance! Best!0 -
How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?
I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What is the Good URL structure for Blog posts
Please let me know what is the goood URL structure for blog posts http://www.abc.com/postname/ or http://www.abc.com/�tegory%/%postname% If Category, Can we name it Blog like website/blog/postname or it is good to use actual categories, and How many categories we can use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Menu Structure for Large Ecommerce
Hi We have a large ecommerce site, the menu at the moment is limited by the amount of categories we can display. As our site is so large, the menu at the moment only has the top categories and their immediate subcategories, however we have level 3's which go deeper, as there is such a large range. At the moment, they;re not in the top menu, but I want to put a case forward to say why we should include them - I am however mindful of a menu not being overcrowded with hundreds of links. Has anyone had a similar experience of this? Or a case study on how adding important categories to the menu helped improve things? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Meta-description not used at all times
Hi all We are marketing an e-commerce site and seem to have a weird issue. For some reason the clearly specified meta description is not being used in the SERPs. Had a look in the source but all tags seems to be there. The site can be found here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify
www.bangerhead.se A sample search in Google that uses the wrong info in the SERP:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSE548SE548&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bangerhead Any ideas to why this is? Grateful for any inputHave a nice day Fredrik0 -
E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea
Hi guys, Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation: potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB). And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand'). Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first. I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter850 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0