• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. Digital Marketing
        3. Web Design
        4. Missing Meta Description Tag - Wordpress Tag

        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 Tag - Wordpress Tag

        Web Design
        4
        6
        8006
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • petewinter
          petewinter last edited by

          I am going through my crawl diagonostics issues and I have lots of "Missing Meta Description Tags". However when I look at the url's they are Wordpress Tags, which do not have a meta description.

          Shall I just ignore these errors or should I find a way to add a meta description? Is it important?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • jonnyholt
            jonnyholt last edited by

            You can also add meta descriptions to the tags individually in WP.  Just go to "Posts" > 
            "Tags" and then edit each tag to have a meta description.

            On a side note, in a wordpress site, it is really not a good idea to index your "Tag Pages".  Sure 3 years ago you would have wanted to because Search Engines put more value on how many pages your website has.  In 2013 it has a number of negative consequences that Google especially doesn't approve of.  First it adds a ton of pages to your site too quickly - Google likes things to grow at a common rate.  (If you have a team of 30 people blogging 5 blogs a day Google will see that and be ok with more tags, but if your adding one blog a day and 25 pages are being created thats a problem)  Second, if you add one blog and give it 5 new tags that have never been used before, Google will see 5 new pages with the exact same content on it.  You will see these errors on you SEOmoz Campaign report.  Lastly, its hard to control the meta descriptors though easier with a SEO program.

            Leaving out your Tags but indexing your Categories may be a better option, but of course that draws the question, why use tags at all right?  Well in the search engine world, its best to create for the user and not the search engine.  So tags are used to help the user find other articles or blogs like the one they have landed on.  In the last 5 years, tags were about creating huge amounts of pages but now days you have to weigh the good over the bad.

            -this is my opinion and not that of SEOmoz.-

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Mark_Ginsberg
              Mark_Ginsberg @petewinter last edited by

              You can create a template for the titles and metadescriptions of the tags also in Yoast - go to the section of titles, and then in the taxonomies section, you can create a template for titles and meta descriptions. Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you'll see what you can dynamically insert in your template text.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • petewinter
                petewinter @Mark_Ginsberg last edited by

                Thanks for your reply. Funny you mention the yoast seo plugin. I installed it earlier today. Your right it is good.

                I do want meta descriptions on my tags as they are getting picked up by search engines. Do you know how I can add them in Wordpress as I can find the option?

                Mark_Ginsberg 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • honestabejosh
                  honestabejosh last edited by

                  I just want to back up Mark Ginsberg's suggestion to you.  I currently manage several WP sites and I would not do without Yoast on any of the.  Not saying there is not other good SEO plugins available, but Yoast is straight forward, yet powerful.  WP without an SEO plugin can be a mess, and limiting what is allowed to index will certainly help you by leaps and bounds.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • Mark_Ginsberg
                    Mark_Ginsberg last edited by

                    If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

                    You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

                    Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.

                    petewinter 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • RyanUK

                      Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?

                      I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.

                      Web Design | | RyanUK
                      0
                    • vtmoz

                      WordPress redirects are taking too long to navigate: Anyone ever faced this?

                      Hi community, We are using wordpress website. We have redirected hundreds of URLs from wordpress redirect manager for last 10 years around. Suddenly from last one week, the redirects are taking too long to navigate to the pages; like around 1 minute. Could you anybody face the same issue? Please help me on this. Thanks

                      Web Design | | vtmoz
                      0
                    • serverleap

                      Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1

                      Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.

                      Web Design | | serverleap
                      1
                    • Mark_Ch

                      Wordpress: Pages vs Posts vs Portfolio

                      Hi All, I'm looking to put pen to paper and design my main structual template for my website. I will be creating the new site in Wordpress. My understanding of Wordpress is broken into the Static Pages, Posts and Portfolio. Static PAGE
                      Static one off content.
                      No tags, categories or archived Posts
                      content entries, which is listed in reverse chronological order.
                      Update post entry to maintain overall freshness of your website.
                      tags, categories & archived Portfolio
                      ????? Question What are the benefits of a portfolio page over Static Pages & Posts When creating feature rich articles should i use static pages, posts or portfolio. Thanks Mark

                      Web Design | | Mark_Ch
                      0
                    • funclub247

                      Using H tags and its maximum Limits

                      hi..
                      I want to Know what is a Maximum limit of using H tags in One Page : for Eg : I Know That I Can use Only One H1 Tag per Page, What about Other H tag Limit..
                      h1 - 1 time Maximum
                      h2 - ..?
                      h3 - ..?
                      h4 - ..?
                      h5 - ..?
                      h6 - ..?
                      h7 - ..?
                      .....
                      i want to target more than 30 key word using H tag as a header of the paragraph...

                      Web Design | | funclub247
                      1
                    • EscaladeSports

                      Other tags inside an H1 tag

                      So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy. The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it". To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a . Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well. An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes" In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that. In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it: -H1-
                      Big Shoes
                      -span- for Big Guys -/span-
                      -div- Nike
                      -span- Shoes -/span-
                      -/div-
                      -/H1- So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1? The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...

                      Web Design | | EscaladeSports
                      1
                    • NiallSmith

                      META ATTRIBUTES - DOES ORDER MATTER!?!

                      Good Morning Mozers, I am currently working with a developer on a new website and they've recently sent me some mock-ups. When I viewed the source, however, the  order of the 'META' attributes was much different than any web page I've seen before. From what it appears, the developer had placed 'mobile', 'cache expiration' and a number of other attributes much more highly than what I'm used to seeing the portion lead with, i.e. META description, META keywords, etc. With that, my question for the community is: does the order of the META 'attributes' matter when developing a new website? If you have (what appear to be) less important attributes placed closer to the beginning tag, does it make (what were previously considered the most 'relevant attributes) less important to the spiders when they come crawl the site? Finally, what are the best META attributes and best method for constructing the meta portion of the code on a web page?

                      Web Design | | NiallSmith
                      0
                    • LMDNYC

                      How do search engines interpret <hgroup>...</hgroup> tags?

                      Hi there. I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new <hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation. In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity? For example, say I have: <hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup> How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the <hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single tag (" Article Heading: Article Sub-heading ") or two separate heading tags (one and one )? Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes? <hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup> One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)? Thanks! </hgroup> </hgroup>

                      Web Design | | LMDNYC
                      2

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.