Page missing meta description some times a good thing?
-
Just courious to why http://moz.com/learn/seo does not appear to have the meta tag:
name="description" content="">
Is this purposely done this way for some reason? Or has it become less important?
Just curious.
-
That's probally the only answer I could think of. Thanks.
-
I generally leave all meta descriptions blank. Once a month I pull down our webmaster tools ranking and clickthru data, and figure out what the average clickthru is on our keywords. When a keyword is under performing on clickthrus, I will go to the ranking page, and make adjustments to the meta information.
-
With meta descriptions, if often dealer's choice. If you don't provide a meta description, Google's search snippet will pull the relevant text from your page that matches the user's query, which sometimes may help click-through rate.
On the other hand, a well crafted meta description can also help attract the right kind of clicks.
In this case, however, I fear it was just plain oversight. We update this page a lot, and I believe the meta description simply got lost in one of the many development cycles. So thanks for the heads up!
-
Yes, Google recommends to leave the meta-descriptions empty rather than have non-unique meta-descriptions.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-meta-descriptions-17695.html
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
-
Does adding new pages, new slugs, new URLS in a site affects rankings and visibility?
hi reader, i have decided to add new pages to my site. if i add new urls, i feel like i have to submit the sitemap again. my question is, does submitting sitemap again with new slugs or urls affects visibility is serps, if yes, how do i minimize the impact?
Web Design | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Are slides how's etc the new Splash Pages?
[How did Moz know that my question was about this?!] I've just completed an audit of nearly 50 websites in the tourism industry and 90% had a slideshow, large image or video taking up more than the initial screen on the fairly large screened Chromebook that I'm using. I'm advising them all to ditch this and am often getting resistance from the site owners and their web developers. I know that these can be better optimized for page load speed, which is poor for most of these sites, especially on mobile devices; but from a usability standpoint, are these affective at drawing in users? Do users take the time to view these? Are they annoyed at always having to scroll down to see if there is anything else useful on the homepage? I think they are like the splash pages of the past: poor for usability and SEO. I've advised to at least make sure that the images are sized so the top of the page fits any screen (some of them do resize well for mobile devices, but maybe not laptops/desktops), include text with calls to action and click through to relevant content. I've been noting that they aren't media businesses selling images or videos, so they need to get their offerings to the top of the page so that users can see and engage more quickly. Anyone have any stats or experience on this? Thanks, Ann
Web Design | | anndonnelly0 -
We're considering making notable changes to our website's navigation. Other than 301 redirects from old pages to new, what do I need to consider with this type of move or update?
We would like to make some navigation changes to our website: www.NetGainIT.com, specifically to the services section. I know that I will need a list of 301 redirects if I do not plan on keeping certain pages, but what else do I need to consider?
Web Design | | NetGainTech0 -
HELP! IE secure page display issue on new live site
For some reason IE 7, 8, & 9 do not display the following page: https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/protools.htm All they show is the Norton seal. It shows properly in all other browsers without issue (including IE 10+), but the earlier versions flash the page for a split second, then hides everything. Can someone shed some light on this? This is a new live site we just launched minutes ago and these browsers account for 12% of our overall traffic. UGH I hate you microsoft!!! Thanks all 🙂
Web Design | | TheDude0 -
Major home page change!
Hi Mozzers, Making a major homepage change on my site Orangeoctop.us. I am going from featuring content to featuring products, similar to how moz and hubspot feature their content on the homepage. Just to give you some numbers, the homepage only sees 2.6% of the total traffic and of that traffic half is direct. The homepage is going to be changed to OrangeOctop.us/guides. My Question: Is there anything that should be added to the homepage to ensure that I keep the same domain authority/page authority?
Web Design | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Force SSL. Good or Bad?
My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point. Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain? I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page. For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com. 1099pro.com www.1099pro.com http://1099pro.com http://www.1099pro.com
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
Pages vs. Posts for SEO
Hi, I would like your thoughts about pages vs. posts for SEO. I understand the difference in terms of WP structure and have read the SEOmoz blog post about setting up your site for SEO success (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). However, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it seems that either one could work, from an on-page SEO perspective, as far as title tag, URL, meta description, etc. So how do you decide whether to set up a page vs. a post? What are the pros and cons, from an SEO perspective, about using one vs. the other? Thanks in advance! Carolina
Web Design | | csmm0