Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Missing Meta Description tags?
-
I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up.
Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? -
However, I will ask you just to clarify - which meta description is getting picked up? The one further down the page? If that's the one getting indexed, then it's something else probably... shoot me an email at help@seomoz.org and I can dig into it further to see if it's a bug on our side. Thanks!
-
Hey Xavier!
This was the reason we weren't seeing it, but as you can see, Google's crawler is a clever little thing. It can pick up a lot of cool stuff that Roger can't. Fortunately, this is exactly the type of error we want Roger to show you, so we probably wouldn't change it so Roger could figure out these things anyways. It's great that Google figured it out, but it would have been understandable if they hadn't been able to.
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you. We actually commented that out to try and direct the search engines to the All-in-One SEO meta tags, which occur further down the page. Google seems to be picking up the meta descriptions ok - we can see tem on SERPs just fine. Guess it's just when SEOMoz is crawling?
Thanks,
Xavier
-
Thanks. Yes, I commented out the first, which is auto-generated by our Theme/WP.
-
Unforutnately, your elements are hidden inside comment tags. Here's what I'm seeing on the page when I perform a "View Source":
The comment tags are "". They're usually used to hide content from rendering on the client-side. Learn more about HTML comment tags here: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/misc/comment.html
Not sure why you'd contain these valid elements within comment tags, but that's why SEOmoz can't see them. I'd suggest that this is also not best practice for Google and other search engines, even if they've managed to extract them.
So: remove the two comment tags from your elements and you'll be back in the clear. Cheers!
-
Unsure why SEOmoz tools are missing it, I can see you are using All in One SEO pack and you do have meta descriptions. You actually have 2!!!
The head area of your pages has all sorts going on with javascript and many link tags. If possible you should try to clean it up a bit, I'd suggest. Then obviously ensure you have only one meta description.
Hopefully when a moz staffer sees this thread they'll take a look into your bug.
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
-
Missing description + Missing or invalid H1
So I have more than 1.4K Meta Data Issues that states that there is "Missing Description" together with "Missing or invalid H1" and I have spent so many hours trying to figure this out, still no luck.. The problem seems to be to add a description in a specific tag, for example: https://www.troyhoffman.com/blog/tag/courage The platform I use (Squarespace) doesn't allow me to add a description to e specific tag. Any ideas on how I can fix this problems? 5TBfuDj
Moz Pro | | DaniellaSerquen1 -
How crucial are H1 tags and descriptions in wordpress categories?
Hi all Trying to improve SEO for my (mostly) local site, www.nectarbridge.com, and recently got back on Moz Pro account. First crawl of my site by Moz, a manageable number of issues that I've mostly sorted, but the category with the largest number of problems is missing or invalid tags. My content pages and blog posts are not missing the tags. It's category, archives, etc., including multiple pages, ex: https://www.nectarbridge.com/category/blog/page/4/ A smaller number of pages are being flagged by Moz as missing descriptions, and they are also category pages and the like. So the question is - how hard should I pursue fixing these issues? I'm using the divi theme, which apparently doesn't display the category description by default (if it did, that would kill two birds with one stone). There is a fix to add the category description, but before I get into that I'm trying to discern whether this issue really matters greatly to SEO or if I should spend that time just working on more content.
Moz Pro | | gary_nectarbridge0 -
My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?
Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it? This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion. Thank you. | |
Moz Pro | | dlmilli1 -
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro. I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway. I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
Moz Pro | | AliMac260 -
How to find missing or incorrect title tags with a site hosting lots of pages.
i have a website that features more than 9,000 pages. i'm trying to figure out which ones have missing or incorrect title tags. Should I start with screaming frog??
Moz Pro | | SapphireCo0 -
Meta Tag Descriptions not being found in Moz Crawls
Hey guys, I have been managing a few websites and have input them into Moz for crawl reports, etc. For a while I have noticed that we were getting a gratuitous amount of errors when it came to the number of missing meta tags. It was numbering in the 200's. The sites were in place before I got here and a lot of the older posts no one had even attempted to include tags, links of the page or anything. As they are all Wordpress Sites and they all already had the Yoast/Wordpress SEO plug-in installed on them, I decided I would go through each post and media file one at a time and update their meta tags via the plug in. I personally did this so I know that I added and saved each one, however the Moz crawl reports continue to show that we are missing roughly 200 meta tags. I've seen a huge drop off in 404 errors and stuff since I went through and double checked everything on the sites, however the meta tag errors persist. Is this the case that Moz is not recognizing the tags when it crawls because I used the Yoast Plugin? Or would you say that the plugin is the issue and I should find another way to add meta tags to the pages and posts on the site? My main concern is that if Moz is having issues crawling the sites, is Google also seeing the same thing? The URLS include:
Moz Pro | | MOZ.info
sundancevacationsblog.com
sundancevacationsnews.com
sundancevacationscharities.com Any help would be appreciated!0 -
Multiple meta descriptions found - MozBar
We are getting "Multiple meta descriptions found!" error when testing meta in the Chrome MozBar extension. We are using the Wordpress All in One SEO plugin. Thinking there may be a conflict with default meta description being blank and needing removed to not conflict with meta generated by All in One SEO. Curious if anyone has come across this and any info on eradicating the issue would be greatly appreciated. Most likely a newbie question on my part. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | departikan0 -
Blogger Duplicate Content? and Canonical Tag
Hello: I previously asked this question, but I would love to get more perspectives on this issue. In Blogger, there is an archive page and label(s) page(s) created for each main post. Firstly, does Google, esp. considering Blogger is their product, possibly see the archive and tag pages created in addition to the main post as partial duplicate content? The other dilemma is that each of these instances - main post, archive, label(s) - claim to be the canonical. Does anyone have any insight or experience with this issue and Blogger and how Google is treating the partial duplicates and the canonical claims to the same content (even though the archives and label pages are partial?) I do not see anything in Blogger settings that allows altering these settings - in fact, the only choices in Blogger settings are 'Email Posting' and 'Permissions' (could it be that I cannot see the other setting options because I am a guest and not the blog owner?) Thanks so much everyone! PS - I was not able to add the blog as a campaign in SEOmoz Pro, which in and of itself is odd - and which I've never seen before - could this be part of the issue? Are Blogger free blogs not able to be crawled for some reason via SEOmoz Pro?
Moz Pro | | holdtheonion0