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 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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1
Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.
Web Design | | serverleap1 -
Does the order of meta data matter ?
There are three questions here. 1/ Does it matter in which order you list the meta tags.? Title , Description etc. 2/ Should these be bang at the top of the head section or is it irrelevant as long as they are there? Finally our generated site is written so that the output is in the following form:- Would it be better to suppress the id= tag or move it to the end. I have gut feel that this is detremental when it comes to some search engines but have not done any analysis.
Web Design | | Eff-Commerce0 -
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 -
Using H tags and its maximum Limits
hi..
Web Design | | funclub247
I want to Know what is a Maximum limit of using H tags in One Page : for Eg : I Know That I Can use Only One H1 Tag per Page, What about Other H tag Limit..
h1 - 1 time Maximum
h2 - ..?
h3 - ..?
h4 - ..?
h5 - ..?
h6 - ..?
h7 - ..?
.....
i want to target more than 30 key word using H tag as a header of the paragraph...1 -
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
Web Design | | jaychow0 -
META ATTRIBUTES - DOES ORDER MATTER!?!
Good Morning Mozers, I am currently working with a developer on a new website and they've recently sent me some mock-ups. When I viewed the source, however, the order of the 'META' attributes was much different than any web page I've seen before. From what it appears, the developer had placed 'mobile', 'cache expiration' and a number of other attributes much more highly than what I'm used to seeing the portion lead with, i.e. META description, META keywords, etc. With that, my question for the community is: does the order of the META 'attributes' matter when developing a new website? If you have (what appear to be) less important attributes placed closer to the beginning tag, does it make (what were previously considered the most 'relevant attributes) less important to the spiders when they come crawl the site? Finally, what are the best META attributes and best method for constructing the meta portion of the code on a web page?
Web Design | | NiallSmith0 -
Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?
I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble. For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain. Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's. Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com. The site is ranking well for some terms. I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term. If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings? Thanks for any thoughts. Much appreciated! Josh
Web Design | | JoshTurner0