HTML entity characters in meta descriptions
-
Is it okay to leave HTML entity characters, such as " in meta descriptions? Will search engines translate these appropriately?
-
Thank you for the response, Zee.
I've been told that Google is "familiar" with character escaping and will interpret the description correctly. Is there a way to confirm this?
We're programmatically populating meta descriptions for one of our applications and having trouble converting the HTML entity characters.
Thank you
Ellen- -
Hey there! Meta descriptions support non-encoded characters, and search engines will display these characters correctly in SERPs; you don't need to use " to represent " in meta descriptions. You'll see an example of this for the w3 result in this SERP, where you see the " as well as " in its meta description.
Since you're writing meta descriptions for users, and not search engine crawlers, I would recommend you find + replace these characters with their reader-friendly version. Search engines will present the characters you've inserted into your meta descriptions, which may negatively impact users' abilities to read your meta descriptions (and be less likely to click on your results in search).
hope this helps
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
-
Site's meta description is not being shown in Google Search results. Instead our privacy policy is getting indexed.
We re-launched our new site and put in the re-directs. Our site is https://www.fico.com/en. When I search for "fico" in Google. I see the privacy policy getting indexed as meta descriptions instead of our actual meta description. I have edited the meta description, requested Google to re-index our site. Not sure what to do next? Thanks for your advise.
Technical SEO | | gosheen0 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Website Redesign / Switching CMS / .aspx and .html extensions question
Hello everyone, We're currently preparing a website redesign for one of our important websites. It is our most important website, having good rankings and a lot of visitors from Search Engines, so we want to be really careful with the redesign. Our strategy is to keep as much in place as possible. At first, we are only changing the styling of the website, we will keep the content, the structure, and as much as URLs the same as possible. However, we are switching from a custom build CMS system which created URLs like www.homepage.com/default-en.aspx
Technical SEO | | NielsB
No we would like to keep this URL the same , but our new CMS system does not support this kind of URLs. The same with for instance the URL: www.homepage.com/products.html
We're not able to recreate this URL in our new CMS. What would be the best strategy for SEO? Keep the URLs like this:
www.homepage.com/default-en
www.homepage.com/products Or doesn't it really matter, since Google we view these as completely different URLs? And, what would the impact of this changes in URLs be? Thanks a lot in advance! Best Regards, Jorg1 -
Html Improvements Missing title tags
Hi, Webmaster suddently today i could see 100's of posts showing title tags are missing Html Improvements Missing title tags https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/html-suggestions?hl=en&siteUrl= Please see image Can anyone help on why this happened suddenly and what is this and whats the solution http://imgur.com/zHsXVJN Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
LSI keywords logic - enter in meta and bold in text?
Hello, In the lack of good info about this on the Internet, let me try here. I know that it is a good idea to put LSI keywords in natural flow in the body text of the article. But shall I also put LSI keywords as a meta? In the same manner as doing with non-LSI keywords? Or shall I only reserve meta for non-LSI keywords? In body text, shall I emphasize LSI keywords in bold? As non-LSI keywords already does. This is a bit confusing as I don't wan't LSI keywords to take over show from my long tail (phrase) keyword. I will appreciate if someone could share a bit light over this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SEOisSEO0 -
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 -
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Technical SEO | | greyniumseo0 -
Duplicate META Description
Two of my urls point to the same site. For example: 123.com and OneTwoThree.com. Because the pages have two separate url's and the same content, my Google Webmaster Tools account is showing this as Duplicate Meta Descriptions. Is there a way around this?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0