Pull meta descriptions from a website that isn't live anymore
-
Hi all, we moved a website over to Wordpress 2 months ago. It was using .cfm before, so all of the URLs have changed. We implemented 301 redirects for each page, but we weren't able to copy over any of the meta descriptions.
We have an export file which has all of the old web pages. Is there a tool that would allow us to upload the old pages and extract the meta descriptions so that we can get them onto the new website? We use the Yoast SEO plugin which has a bulk meta descriptions editor, so I'm assuming that the easiest/most effective way would be to find a tool that generates some sort of .csv or excel file that we can just copy and paste? Any feedback/suggestions would be awesome, thanks!
-
You can pull the meta descriptions with Screaming Frog from the Wayback Machine if your site is archived. If you want to do this, let me know and I'll help you with the settings.
-
I would do it one better and crawl from a local web server, just to be sure. But in all reality, a password protected directory is probably more accessible, in this instance.
-
Note Ray-pp suggests you use a private directory... Make sure to keep it out of the serps
-
Thanks Ray, we've used the Screaming From Spider for some time now, I've flirted with the idea of re-uploading the web files. This may be our best option, thanks.
-
Hi George,
If you can upload the old pages to a private directory, you can then use Screaming Frog SEO tool to crawl all of the pages and retrieve the meta descriptions. That would allow you to easily export much of the on-page SEO, include your meta information.
Screaming Frog SEO spider is a mus have tool for SEOs - check it out if you haven't already!
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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
New Website's Not Ranking for Branded Term
Hey Friends, I can't seem to figure out why https://feello.com/ isn't ranking on Google for it's branded term (Feello). It's ranking in 1st position on Bing and Yahoo but on page 2 (16th or so) on Google. Going through the list and can't come up with an answer. Metadata: Yes Indexed to Webmaster: Yes, Fetched pages: Yes Google cache on May 27, 2017: Check Using canonical and redirecting for non-www and HTTPS version: Yes & Yes Feello in domain name: Yes Set up social profiles and GMB: Yes Driving traffic: Yes, some email and ads Checked robots.txt: Yes, not created yet Created and Submitted Sitemap: Yes - https version Checked for blocked resources: None. The list goes on...Any ideas would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GarrettDenham0 -
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?
Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yosef
Expedia uses it:
http://prntscr.com/74ofrv 74ofrv0 -
Duplicated Meta Descriptions on Dynamic Paginated Pages
If the title didn't put you off please read on! 🙂 According to our latest Moz Crawl Report we have circa 700 instances of duplicate Meta Description on pages that are both dynamically created and also paginated, however, I believe that number to be greater! We are unable to manual make changes to these pages (because they are dynamic) and so we need ask our web devs to create a change in how the Meta is created... If I am not making myself clear (and there is a good chance that I'm not!) then here is an example of what I mean; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/ There are 92 pages of cruise deals for this particular operator with the results of each page having the option to sort by 4 categories; Recommended Cruise Price Sail Date Best Value 4 x 92 = 368 instances just for this one operator! The current Meta Desc is; A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents. ...which isn't great I know! The problem is how to make each page (in each category) unique If any of you have incurred anything similar and have any kind of solution or recommendation then please respond - I would be most grateful! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
%20 Rewrite in CMS doesn't get picked up by Search Engiens
Hi Mozzers I have a little issue on a rewrite that was implemented on a CMS. The CMS was built for my client without the option to put custom slugs in. So it takes the title of a post or page and uses it as a URL, the site was launched with a rewrite so that any space in the title is replaced with a - and that is the permanent URL for that post/page. This morning when I was busy doing my checkup on the site I found that the URLs are being indexed as %20 and not - however, if you navigate through the site the URLs are displaying correctly. How is it that search engines pick this up as a space in the slug if it has clearly been set as a - anyone had this issue before? Its causing duplicate content issues on the site because both ways display the same post/page. Cheers, Chris Captivate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Duplicate Title Tags & Duplication Meta Description after 301 Redirect
Today, I was checking my Google webmaster tools and found 16,000 duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description. I have investigate for this issue and come to know about as follow. I have changed URL structure for 11,000 product pages on 3rd July, 2012 and set up 301 redirect from old product pages to new product pages. Google have started to crawl my new product pages but, De-Indexing of old URLs are quite slower. That's why I found this issue on Google webmaster tools. Can anyone suggest me, How can I increase ratio of De-Indexing for old URLs? OR any other suggestions? How much time Google will take to De-Index old URLs from web search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Website monitoring online censorship in China - what's holding us back?
We run https://greatfire.org, a non-profit website which lets you test if a website or keyword is blocked or otherwise censored in China. There are a number of websites that nominally offer this service, and many of them rank better than us in Google. However, we believe this is unfortunate since their testing methods are inaccurate and/or not transparent. More about that further down*. We started GreatFire in February, 2011 as a reaction to ever more pervasive online censorship in China (where we are based). Due to the controversy of the project and the political situation here, we've had to remain anonymous. Still, we've been able to reach out to other websites and to users. We currently have around 3000 visits per month out of which about 1000 are from organic search. However, SEO has been a headache for us from the start. There are many challenges in running this project and our team is small (and not making any money from this). Those users that do find us on relevant keywords seem to be happy since they spend a long time on the website. Examples: websites blocked in china: 6 minutes+
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org
great firewall of china test: 8 minutes+ So, here are some SEO questions related to GreatFire.org. If you can give us advice it would be greatly appreciated and you would truly help us in our mission to bring transparency and spread awareness of online censorship in China: Each URL tested in our database has its own page. Our database contains 25000 URLs (and growing). We have previously been advised that one SEO problem is that we appear to have a lot of duplicate data, since the individual URL pages are very similar. Because of this, we've added automatic tags to most pages. We then exclude certain pages from this rule that are considered high-priority, such as domains ranked highly by Alexa and keywords that are blocked. Is this a good approach? Do you think the duplicate content factor is still holding us back? Can we improve? Some of our pages have meta descriptions, but most don't. Should we add them on URL pages? They would be set to a certain pattern which again might make them look very similar and could cause the duplicate content warning to go off. Suggestions? Many of the users that find us in Google search for keywords that aren't relevant to what we offer, such as "https.facebook.com" and lots of variations of that. Obviously, they leave the website quickly. This means that the average time that people coming from Google are spending on our website is quite low (2 minutes) and the bounce rate quite high (68%). Can we or should we do something to discourage being found on non-relevant keywords? Are there any other technical problems you can see that are holding our SEO back? Thank you very much! *Competitors ranking higher searching for "test great firewall china": 1. http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org. They are only a frontend website for this service: http://www.viewdns.info/chinesefirewall. ViewDNS only checks for DNS records which is one of three major methods to block websites. So many websites and keywords that are not DNS poisoned, but are blocked by IP or by keyword, will be specified as available, when in fact they are blocked. Our system uses actual test locations inside China to try to download the URL to be tested and checks for different types of censorship. 2. http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html. This is a better service in that they seem to do actual testing from inside China. However, they only display partial results, they do not explain test results and they do not offer historic data on whether the URL was blocked in the past. We do all of that.0