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 descriptions from Google SERPs
-
Hullo all,
I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully.
Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs.
Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap!
Thank you in advance!
-
Hi, yes Google does not care about the keywords meta tag but abusing it is also not recommended as some other search engines still consider this tag a little bit. Moreover, abusing or over optimizing keywords meta tag tells a lot about the intent of a webmaster which is even more dangerous.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
No, as long as you're not also spamming your page copy with your specific target keywords. Nonetheless, it doesn't look very professional.
-
We don't even bother populating that section any more. Now, that said, Bing does care about them to some degree, so it depends how much you may care about that search engine.
Matt Cutts has specifically said Google doesn't care about meta keywords, so I find it surprising that it'd be used to penalize.
-
More relevance while leaning towards click through rate/call to action. It's a balance.
-
Thank you Devanur, I shall definitely look into this. I do have a question though- if Google doesn't really care about the keywords meta tag, then it shouldn't matter what I have written in it, right? So do you think I'll still be in potential danger of an over optimisation penalty, keep this in mind?
-
So the only way out would be to have more relevant meta descriptions, right? Any words on that?
Thank you Chris!
-
Thank you PremioOscar. Will keep this in mind.
-
Chris has it spot on..
Was just curious at the keywords meta tag on your home page:
With this kind of keywords meta tag you are definitely inviting an over optimization penalty. Moreover, you can safely drop the keywords meta tag and its of little to no use these days and Google does not care about it.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
suchde, as says premiooscar, it is not a given that Google uses your meta description in the snippet. In fact, in Google's own words, "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." In fact, you can find that for each different search query that your page comes as a result, you can have a different snippet--it could be the fully from the meta description, fully from the page copy, or a combination of page copy and meta description info.
-
Hello there,
Sometimes Google picks up other information from the page rather than using the meta description when it considers that your meta description are not very relevant for what customers have looked for.
Just make your meta descriptions more relevant.
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
-
Google News and Discover down by a lot
Hi,
Technical SEO | | SolenneGINX
Could you help me understand why my website's Google News and Discover Performance dropped suddenly and drastically all of a sudden in November? numbers seem to pick up a little bit again but nowhere close what we used to see before then0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Do Meta Keywords matter?
I am a firm believer in the fundamentals of SEO but is there any data to support its impact positively or negatively towards a sites rank?
Technical SEO | | Brandonp0 -
Can you force Google to use meta description?
Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Why is my blog disappearing from Google index?
My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing. 2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc. The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc. So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days. site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm Thanks for any help in advance.
Technical SEO | | Silkstream0 -
Google truncating or altering meta title - affect rankings?
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure) Anyway, the rankings for the home page have dropped quite a bit. I'm wondering if the change that Google makes affects rankings (i.e. name of site doesn't have all the keywords).
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat
MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0 -
How do I add meta descriptions to Archives in Wordpress?
My most recent crawl returned a number of 'missing meta description' errors, and when I checked individual URLs, it turned out they were Wordpress Archived pages - for individual months and days (e.g. http:// .../2011/01). What's the best way to go about adding descriptions to these pages, if at all? Or should I have these pages not be indexed? I am using the All in One SEO plugin, so maybe there is an easy fix through this plugin, or it may be the cause of these errors? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance! **EDIT After looking it up further, I have decided to use noindex for Archives, which should solve my problem right? Or is there a benefit to having those archived pages?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0