Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Missing Meta Description tags?
-
I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up.
Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? -
However, I will ask you just to clarify - which meta description is getting picked up? The one further down the page? If that's the one getting indexed, then it's something else probably... shoot me an email at help@seomoz.org and I can dig into it further to see if it's a bug on our side. Thanks!
-
Hey Xavier!
This was the reason we weren't seeing it, but as you can see, Google's crawler is a clever little thing. It can pick up a lot of cool stuff that Roger can't. Fortunately, this is exactly the type of error we want Roger to show you, so we probably wouldn't change it so Roger could figure out these things anyways. It's great that Google figured it out, but it would have been understandable if they hadn't been able to.
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you. We actually commented that out to try and direct the search engines to the All-in-One SEO meta tags, which occur further down the page. Google seems to be picking up the meta descriptions ok - we can see tem on SERPs just fine. Guess it's just when SEOMoz is crawling?
Thanks,
Xavier
-
Thanks. Yes, I commented out the first, which is auto-generated by our Theme/WP.
-
Unforutnately, your elements are hidden inside comment tags. Here's what I'm seeing on the page when I perform a "View Source":
The comment tags are "". They're usually used to hide content from rendering on the client-side. Learn more about HTML comment tags here: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/misc/comment.html
Not sure why you'd contain these valid elements within comment tags, but that's why SEOmoz can't see them. I'd suggest that this is also not best practice for Google and other search engines, even if they've managed to extract them.
So: remove the two comment tags from your elements and you'll be back in the clear. Cheers!
-
Unsure why SEOmoz tools are missing it, I can see you are using All in One SEO pack and you do have meta descriptions. You actually have 2!!!
The head area of your pages has all sorts going on with javascript and many link tags. If possible you should try to clean it up a bit, I'd suggest. Then obviously ensure you have only one meta description.
Hopefully when a moz staffer sees this thread they'll take a look into your bug.
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
-
Unsolved Next JS and Missing content
Hello
Moz Pro | | 4thWhale
We recently migrated our page to next JS which is supposed to be great for SEO
On almost all our pages we are getting the same errors Missing Canonical Tag Missing Title Missing or Invalid H1 Missing Description We don't understand this because we have all of that content on every page. We believe that maybe NextJs is having a incompatibility with Moz. Has anyone had any experience with this?0 -
Source page showsI have 2 h1 tags on my page. I can only find one.
When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens
Moz Pro | | Coot0 -
Why Only Our Homepage Can Be Crawled Showing a Redirect Message as the Meta Title
Hello Everyone, So recently when we checked our domain using a Moz Crawl Test and Screaming Frog only the homepage comes up and the meta title says “You are being redirected to…”. We have several pages that used to come up and when submitting them to GSC no issues come up. The robots.txt file looks fine as well. We thought this might be ‘server’ related but it’s a little out of our field of expertise so we thought we would find out if anyone has any experience with this (ideas of reasons, how to check…etc.) or any potential suggestions. Any extra insight would be really appreciated. Please let us know if there is anything we could provide further details for that might. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thanks in advance. Best,
Moz Pro | | Ben-R0 -
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?
Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it? This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion. Thank you. | |
Moz Pro | | dlmilli1 -
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro. I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway. I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
Moz Pro | | AliMac260 -
Multiple meta descriptions found - MozBar
We are getting "Multiple meta descriptions found!" error when testing meta in the Chrome MozBar extension. We are using the Wordpress All in One SEO plugin. Thinking there may be a conflict with default meta description being blank and needing removed to not conflict with meta generated by All in One SEO. Curious if anyone has come across this and any info on eradicating the issue would be greatly appreciated. Most likely a newbie question on my part. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | departikan0 -
Meta description tag in rss xml file?
The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>
Moz Pro | | scanlin0