Missing Meta Description Tag - Wordpress Tag
-
I am going through my crawl diagonostics issues and I have lots of "Missing Meta Description Tags". However when I look at the url's they are Wordpress Tags, which do not have a meta description.
Shall I just ignore these errors or should I find a way to add a meta description? Is it important?
-
You can also add meta descriptions to the tags individually in WP. Just go to "Posts" >
"Tags" and then edit each tag to have a meta description.On a side note, in a wordpress site, it is really not a good idea to index your "Tag Pages". Sure 3 years ago you would have wanted to because Search Engines put more value on how many pages your website has. In 2013 it has a number of negative consequences that Google especially doesn't approve of. First it adds a ton of pages to your site too quickly - Google likes things to grow at a common rate. (If you have a team of 30 people blogging 5 blogs a day Google will see that and be ok with more tags, but if your adding one blog a day and 25 pages are being created thats a problem) Second, if you add one blog and give it 5 new tags that have never been used before, Google will see 5 new pages with the exact same content on it. You will see these errors on you SEOmoz Campaign report. Lastly, its hard to control the meta descriptors though easier with a SEO program.
Leaving out your Tags but indexing your Categories may be a better option, but of course that draws the question, why use tags at all right? Well in the search engine world, its best to create for the user and not the search engine. So tags are used to help the user find other articles or blogs like the one they have landed on. In the last 5 years, tags were about creating huge amounts of pages but now days you have to weigh the good over the bad.
-this is my opinion and not that of SEOmoz.-
-
You can create a template for the titles and metadescriptions of the tags also in Yoast - go to the section of titles, and then in the taxonomies section, you can create a template for titles and meta descriptions. Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you'll see what you can dynamically insert in your template text.
-
Thanks for your reply. Funny you mention the yoast seo plugin. I installed it earlier today. Your right it is good.
I do want meta descriptions on my tags as they are getting picked up by search engines. Do you know how I can add them in Wordpress as I can find the option?
-
I just want to back up Mark Ginsberg's suggestion to you. I currently manage several WP sites and I would not do without Yoast on any of the. Not saying there is not other good SEO plugins available, but Yoast is straight forward, yet powerful. WP without an SEO plugin can be a mess, and limiting what is allowed to index will certainly help you by leaps and bounds.
-
If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.
You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.
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
-
19 Hours Excessive to Code Single Wordpress Page?
My developer says that is will take 19 hours to modify a listing page of the wpcasa London real estate theme because the existing template is difficult to customize. I am attaching an image of the existing page before customization and an image of a final mock up. Is 19 hours a reasonable amount of time to customize this page? Look forward to feedback. New Design is visible at: https://imgur.com/a/42XBqDD Alan IQ1i0kg
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
2 or more wordpress installs on 1 domain
Hi ....I need to know if anyone has any concerns of running 2 or more WordPress installs on one domain and if so what would the concerns be. The situation is that we have a static html site that has a WordPress blog....and it is installed in example.com/blog/ . We will upgrade the static site to WordPress and this WordPress install will be in example.com/monkeys/ and then we will point its address to the root and make all other needed changes when ready to go live...but the install will stay in its own directory. So bottom-line is we have one domain with two WordPress installs that are each installed in their own sub directory and run from their own independent databases. There are quite a number of reasons for us to want to do this but I wont get into that......I just want to know if anyone has any concerns with this setup? The research we have done says its OK as well as our hosting provider....but before we get cracking we thought maybe one more "educated" input would make us feel more comfortable. Thanks
Web Design | | nomad-2023230 -
Wordpress: Pages vs Posts vs Portfolio
Hi All, I'm looking to put pen to paper and design my main structual template for my website. I will be creating the new site in Wordpress. My understanding of Wordpress is broken into the Static Pages, Posts and Portfolio. Static PAGE
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
Static one off content.
No tags, categories or archived Posts
content entries, which is listed in reverse chronological order.
Update post entry to maintain overall freshness of your website.
tags, categories & archived Portfolio
????? Question What are the benefits of a portfolio page over Static Pages & Posts When creating feature rich articles should i use static pages, posts or portfolio. Thanks Mark0 -
Migrating to Wordpress
Hi Mozzers, happy friday! I'm moving a new clients website from a really bad CMS to Wordpress and wondered what I need to do to do this, get the A record of the old programmers? If someone could do me a checklist that'd be great! Thanks!
Web Design | | KarlBantleman0 -
Wich wordpress pinterest theme is your favourite
Wich wordpress pinterest theme is your favourite I am looking for one more new, modern and responsive to replace the one i have on this web sonrisas
Web Design | | maestrosonrisas0 -
H1 Tags with Location
Hi Everyone, I have a question about trying to get location information into title tags without having it look spammy. What I've been trying is something like this: h1 { font-size:18px; } .h1_sub { font-size:10px; } Why Choose My Company Minnesota Website Design | Minneapolis Web Development I'm not sure if that is a good thing to do or not as everything is inside the h1 tag and visible to the engines however it makes it less prominent on the page and gives a better layout. You can see it at www.mltgroup.com/company.php Thanks
Web Design | | MLTGroup0 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0