Faceted navigation, Affiliate links, Meta descriptions - Oh My!
-
Hi, I have recently come across an issue with the faceted navigation / dynamic URLs for one of my client sites:
From a top level category you can filter by product material, size, type and colour. The URLs which are generated go a little something like this: www.domainname.co.uk/category.aspx?finish=leather&colour=--+no+filter+--
When selected, a 'facet' 302 redirects from the main category URL (no canonical tags in place yet - working on it).
The 'facets' are indexed (although when clicked on from SERPs actually go to a slightly different URL than by navigating there from the site) but they don't display the Meta description in SERPs (instead displaying a list of items from a drop down menu held within a table - probably as it's the first bit of copy the search engines see on the page).
How can I get the Meta description to display in SERPs?
Also, I tried to add a link to a 'facet' from my blog (just for testing purposes) and I got redirected to the page via their affiliate program.
Ideally I want to 'link build' to these pages both internally and via the clients blog but it seems as though there'll be no value in it.
Has anyone come across this before and if so, what can I do about it?
FYI they are using IIS 6 with asp.net
Thanks in advance!
-
Donford's answer is good then - they're probably ignoring those meta description tags as not relevant to the search query. So it's not that they won't display them (assuming they're correctly set up) it's more that they're ignoring them as they're not relevant.
From the horse's mouth: "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
-
Yes there is a meta description - it's the same one as for the main category though, before any filters are aplied. Obv I will look at providing unique descriptions for all of the facets but until I can work out how to get SEs to display them...
-
Is there a meta description tag actually being generated?
-
HI Laura,
I can only comment on one question asked... " How can I get the Meta description to display in Serps?"
Google will use whatever they feel most appropriate for their users. The meta description does hold value, but when Google is returning results to its searchers they will try to return relevant snippets based on what the user searched for.
Example:
Your webpage is about Pajamas and the user searches for Banana Pajamas Google may ignore your Meta description "Family Friendly Pajamas available in cotton and silk for age 2 to adult"And return "banana pajamas....print sizes kids small..available in standard banana print, adult themes and more.."
Remember search engines first priority is the users, not the websites.
Hope that helps with that question. I leave the other stuff for somebody more experienced in ASP.. I'm a php person myself.
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
May Faceted Navigation via ajax #parameter cause duplicated content issues?
We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters. We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point. Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?0 -
257 character meta description showing on Google?
Hi Guys, Noticed this recently, for the keyword "granny flat prices" on Google Australia. See screenshot: https://prnt.sc/fmp4is Any ideas why Google is showing a 257 character description like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Is it possible that Google is pulling description from third party websites and displaying in the description section in organic result?
Hi all, I have come across the most weird situation ever in my SEO career. Google is displaying description in organic results for brand term under the website URL that doesnt exist on the website ANYWHERE but this description does appear on some directory sites created back in 2002 or so. Is there a possibility that Google is pulling info from directory sites and displaying as a description in the organic results? I am super confused! Help needed! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Why my good links disappeared from gWMT?
Hi Last night some of my good links suddenly stopped from being display displayed at the WMT list of links Any thoghts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How do I reduce internal links & cannibalisation from primiary navigation?
SEOmoz tools is reporting each page on our site containing in excess of 200 internal links mostly from our primary navigation menu which it says is too many. This also causes cannibalization on the word towels which i would like to avoid if possible. Is there a way to reduce the number of internal links whilst maintaining a good structure to allow link juice to filter through the site and also reduce cannibalization?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Any good link buying companies ( http://www.text-link-ads.com )
Hi guys I have been passed this website: http://www.text-link-ads.com Has anyone ever used text-links ads before?? Can anyone please show me the way and suggest any really good lin buying companies? I am really fiding it hard to find good places to place inbound links into our website.. Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
How to auto generate a unique meta description?
The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in: <title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title> In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect. How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0