No Meta Description - but I see them??? Confused. :-(

[VenturePhoto]

Hi all,

I just looked at my Moz report, and there are a whole lot of things wrong. No meta descriptions, duplicate content, etc.

I am using Yoast SEO.

My problem is, I then jumped into GWT and it paints a completely different story. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Hugh

moz.png

[ChiarynMiranda]

Always glad to help, Hugh!

[VenturePhoto]

Yes, so two pages each with a vimeo link and just the numerical file reference as a difference, would fail in the 90% rule. Excellent - thanks. I made some changes.  

Hugh

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hi Hugh,

Regarding the duplicate titles, we only report that if the titles are 100% similar. It may not be considered a huge problem in terms of SEO, but we do still think it is important to report on it as it can have some effect on the pages competing against each other.

As for the duplicate content, campaigns have a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means they will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. Although the pages in question may appear to be different on the front end, they are actually duplicates based on this percentage (at least the example URLs I checked in your campaigns.)

You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we think it's better to be safe than sorry.

[VenturePhoto]

Hi Chiaryn,

thanks for the response.

My main concern was the duplicate stuff being reported - 42 of content, and 48 titles. From what I am gathering, this is a big no no for Google. And since GWT was saying something different, I wanted to find out if I had an issue that required resolve.

Would you leave things as they are?

Thanks.

Hugh

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Hugh,

I took a look at your crawl diagnostics and we aren't actually reporting the homepage http://venture.photo as missing the meta description. It looks like most of the pages with that error are the /tag/ or /category/ pages, http://venture.photo/tag/family-shoot for example. Looking at a few of those pages, I do see that we are correctly reporting that they are missing the meta description: http://www.screencast.com/t/bYlGJRw9

Some of the pages do have the code meta property="og:description", but our crawler only recognizes meta name="description", so we would not count the meta property as a meta description in our crawl report.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[VenturePhoto]

Dirk,

awesome information!  Thanks.

Yes, text for the video and photo pages is certainly coming asap. Funny, I was just sitting researching the issue of having no text on the home page - it's a widget based page, so Yoast SEO is saying the text is zero. Makes me start freaking out that I will suffer from this - but I guess that's another topic.

The use of a hyphen between words in alt tags - perfect, I have been also wondering about that very thing.

Thank you so much!

Hugh

[DirkC]

Missing metadescriptions are on your /tag/ pages - but these are noindex so shouldn't be a problem. Few missing metadescriptions apart from that. Normally Moz bot respects noindex - so a bit strange that it's reporting these errors.

Didn't find exact duplicates but I guess these are generated by pages like http://venture.photo/kristine-chris/ - http://venture.photo/danielle-dave/ - the only difference between these pages is the video, which makes it almost impossible for bots to tell the difference between these pages. You could try to add some text & some images (with alt wedding photo) to make these pages more unique or integrate it with the "article style" content you have on site.

The galleries have a bit the same problem - a lot of images - but almost no text. I also noticed that you use "-" between the words in the alt text of the images -which is not necessary - it's even better to make it a plain descriptive text.

rgds

Dirk

[VenturePhoto]

Hi guys,

thanks for the prompt responses. The URL is http://venture.photo

I am trying out the Moz product, so as a paid solution I'm of course hoping for accuracy. When the results are so different from the GWT output, it leaves me scratching my head (especially as a novice)

The meta description is showing in the Yoast code, as is the title. Yet the title also appears at the top of the code. It's all Greek to me.  

Hugh

<html lang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>" prefix="<a class="attribute-value">og: http://ogp.me/ns#</a>">
<head>
<meta charset="<a class="attribute-value">UTF-8</a>" />
<title>Photography | Weddings, Portraits and Family Photographytitle><meta name="<a class="attribute-value">viewport</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0</a>"/>

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Specializing in Weddings, Portraits, and Family photography, Venture Photography is well worth a click. Free consultations. Metro Detroit & surrounding.</a>"/>
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://venture.photo/](view-source:http://venture.photo/)" />
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">publisher</a>" href="[https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/108437181658220505207/+VenturephotographyUs/about](view-source:https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/108437181658220505207/+VenturephotographyUs/about)"/>
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:locale</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">en_US</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">website</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:title</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Photography | Weddings, Portraits and Family Photography</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Specializing in Weddings, Portraits, and Family photography, Venture Photography is well worth a click. Free consultations. Metro Detroit & surrounding.</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:url</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://venture.photo/</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:site_name</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Venture Photography</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">article:publisher</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.facebook.com/VentureWeddingPhotography</a>" />
<meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:image</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://venture.photo/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/venture-logo-2015-140x133.png</a>" />
<script type="<a class="attribute-value">application/ld+json</a>">{ "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "url": "http://venture.photo/", "potentialAction": { "@type": "SearchAction", "target": "http://venture.photo/?s={search_term}", "query-input": "required name=search_term" } }script>

[ofw12387]

Just check in the html code if the meta description exists.

Tip in the brower -> view-source:[YOUR_URL]

And try to find smt like

So you will be able to determinate if you have a meta description or NOT

[DirkC]

Hugh,

Without the actual url is difficult to judge what's going on. If it's a recent site the difference could be related to the crawl frequency. You could always try to double check with a crawler like Screaming Frog (free is you use an url list or for the first 500 crawls).

rgds,

Dirk