How should I fix my short meta descriptions?
-
I recently added meta descriptions to several community-supplied pages for our open source website
Google Webmaster Tools is complaining/warning that the meta descriptions are too short. The descriptions are being supplied by our users and they typically do not lend themselves to anything much longer than what is being entered already.
I was thinking of adding some text to the end of the meta description. Something like "This is one of many third party extensions for Spree supplied free of charge by our community" or something else like that.
Is it acceptable practice to reuse a snippet in your meta description like this? Do you suggest other alternatives? Since meta description doesn't affect page rank can I use terms that I'm trying to rank for on my home page without cannibalizing my link juice?
TIA,
Sean
-
Hey Sean,
We have talked before as we work on one of the spree stores. You need to get content up on all these pages.
For example
http://spreecommerce.com/extensions/267-spree_product_zoom
If it is all user generated content, than you need to make some fields required to help automate this when people add new extensions. Such as title, description.
-Sean
-
Hi Sean,
Note that the meta description tags aren't going to be impacting your rankings. Google doesn't use this tag when determining a pages relevance.
What you do want to be considering is the impact it will have on the click through rate of your listings. By having short meta descriptions you are losing out in two areas:
- Less space is taken up on the page by your listing making it less obvious
- Less time to convince users that they should click on your advert.
Perhaps consider adding on a call to action on the meta description tags to counter both of these issues. Something link - "check out our huge range of third party extensions"?
Hope that helps,
Ben
-
Hey Sean, I had a look at a few and I think you could easily expand these descriptions so enourage your users to work towards a certain number of characters:
Create a multiple slideshow for Spree
becomes
Download page for the spree_multi_slideshow plugin which creates a multiple slideshow for Spree.
That's a bit rubbish but I don't know what Spree is but really, encourage your users to write a more accurate description. Don't use a generic chunk of text, that sucks and does not a strong description of the page make.
To be honest, you may have bigger problems as these pages are all pretty thin on content so getting them to rank at all, let alone display meta descriptions may need a bit of work.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
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
-
Should I include my company entity in meta description? (for ex. LLC. Inc.)
I'm re-writing my meta descriptions. I'm wondering if I should include the My Company, LLC. in the description or just My Company. Taking out the entity would save about 4 characters.
On-Page Optimization | | IcarusSEO1 -
A charset attribute on a meta element found after the first 1024 bytes.
Can anybody help me with this error please... Error: A charset attribute on a meta element found after the first 1024 bytes https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fsocialmotors.uk%2F I have no idea how to find or fix this issue, i have spoke to my theme dev and they say it is not a problem with the theme, so i do not know were to turn now. As you will see in the link above there are a couple of errors, i do not know how to fix them either 😞 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Taylor170 -
I have 75 pages with missing meta tag descriptions. So I add them or do they make no sense?
I have 75 pages with missing meta tag descriptions. So I add them or do they make no sense?
On-Page Optimization | | sarthakss0 -
What to do when writing unique product descriptions is impractical?
Hi Guys, Obviously in an ideal world all product descriptions would be high quality and unique. But do you ever have a client who you know they'll be totally impractical for? For example, one of my clients is a niche book store with 10,000s of products. There are only two members of staff. They currently C+P the blurb. I would love to recommend that they write unique copy for all their books, but considering the books have a low retail value and a fairly short shelf life, I doubt that unique descriptions would be worth the ROI. My initial thoughts are: Identify the high priority books/best sellers and write new product descriptions for them Encourage more customers to leave on-page product reviews Can anyone recommend any better solutions?
On-Page Optimization | | gcdtechnologies0 -
Duplicate eCommerce Product Descriptions
I know that creating original product descriptions is best practices. What I don't understand is how other sites are able to generate significant traffic while still using duplicate product descriptions on all product pages. How are they not being penalized by Google?
On-Page Optimization | | mj7750 -
Are Title meta tag keywords case sensitive'
Hi! One of the fixups that SEOmoz analysis reports is that my main keyword isn't part of the page title. The problema is that the keyrord is there but in uper case while i introduced a lower case keyword for analysis (see the example). BEAUTY (it's in the page title) beauty (that's the keyword i'm analysing) Regards, OV
On-Page Optimization | | ovieira0 -
Are missing Meta Tags a big deal on a blog?
I show 272 missing Meta Description Tags after the crawl completed on my website. Pretty much all of those are from my website hosted wordpress blog. Should I be concerned about this?
On-Page Optimization | | webestate0