Meta descriptions for specific categories/tags not showing?
-
Hi -- I'm really confused as to why only certain blog categories are not able to be crawled for their descriptions when their source codes look identical to other, crawlable pages on the same site?
Specifically, Moz/other tools are not able to pull a meta description from the page http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/premises-liability-videos (and a few others) - while the source code looks almost identical to http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/federal-torts-claims-act-videos ??
Can anyone shed some light into possible issues for me? Thanks in advance!
-
That's odd. Is there a theme conflict? If I was you I'd want to understand root cause. You don't want future theme or plugin updates overriding your fix and putting you back in the same place.
-
Thank you for your answer, Donna! I actually believe it was a coding issue
Yoast was coding the descriptions as meta property="og:description" only. It looks like Moz and many other tools only consider meta name="description" as the proper code (even if og:description was included).
If anyone else is having a similar issue, what I had my team do is make sure to amend the autofilled snippets descriptions provided by Yoast (which they should have been doing anyways). Editing the autofilled descriptions adds the meta name="description" HTML needed. No more missing meta description errors!
-
Moz and other tools aren't able to pull the meta description? I can see the meta description when I view that page using the Moz toolbar. It also gets picked up when I scan the site using screaming frog.
Do you mean it's not displaying as expected in search results? If yes, that sometimes happens b/c Google chooses other content from the page to display if it thinks it's more relevant.
Oleg's observation is a valid one if only part of the meta description is getting picked up and displayed in search results. I've seen that many times. Here's what the Moz Meta Description resource page says about meta description limitations (about 3/4 of the way down the page):
"Quotes Cut Off Descriptions
Any time quotes are used in a meta description, Google cuts off the description. To prevent meta descriptions from being cut off, it's best to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. If quotation marks are important in your meta description, you can change them to single quotes rather than double quotes to prevent truncation."
Also, if the meta description is too long (cutoff somewhere in the 150-160 character range), it will get truncated. Your specific example is 156 characters.
Does that help? If not, please elaborate and perhaps some different insights will be shared.
-
My guess is the apostrophe (') in the meta description that is causing the issue. Check out your other pages that don't have the meta description indexed.
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
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 -
Using http: shorthand inside canonical tag ("//" instead of "http:") can cause harm?
HI, I am planning to launch a new site, and shortly after to move to HTTPS. to save the need to change over 5,000 canonical tags in pages the webmaster suggested we implement inside the rel canonical "//" instead of the absolute path, would that do any damage or be a problem? oranges-south-dakota" />
Technical SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda0 -
Meta description issue on Google
Hello, I have a small issue on Google with our Meta Description tag not always being properly displayed. If you search for the term: Globe Car (in two words), everything is being displayed properly: http://screencast.com/t/YQCUkJnk Now do the same search for the term GlobeCar (in one word) and the meta tag set into our homepage seems to be totallly ignored and Google is now displaying something that is generated from out of their hat: http://screencast.com/t/K0KeeRGSgspV Anyone has an idea what would cause this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GlobeCar1 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
WordPress Slideshow Gallery Not Showing Alt Tags or any relavent info ?
Hi guys i have started adding my seo tags to my image keywords ie alt tags captions etc.... but when i go to inspect the slideshow that image then appears in there none of the alt tags etc in them? Does anyone know how to add then?
Technical SEO | | hemeravisuals0 -
Duplicate Meta Descriptions From Pages That Don't Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1