• seohunters9

        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. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?

        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.

        Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?

        Technical SEO
        5
        5
        849
        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.
        • Viewpoints
          Viewpoints last edited by

          I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great).

          They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown.

          Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks!

          The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Saijo.George
            Saijo.George last edited by

            If you are sending Facebook and Twitter Trafic to these pages try and use Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • SEO5Team
              SEO5Team last edited by

              Hi Brittany,

              While it is not essential to have meta descriptions for each page, especially if they are not indexed by Google, there can still be some benefit to having meta descriptions for pages people are linking to. Users can see the meta description if the page shows up during a search query, and sites with strong meta descriptions tend to come across as more professional. There is always a chance the page can show up in other search engines and directories, so you won’t want to worry about random text showing up. There is no real ranking benefit to meta descriptions, but Google does indicate whether meta descriptions are too long, too short, or too similar in Webmaster Tools, so it would seem Google would consider proper meta descriptions to be of at least some value.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Davenport-Tractor
                Davenport-Tractor last edited by

                Brittany,

                You need to come up with a strategy and stick with it. You didn't say what type of page your "No Index" page is. But you may have a very good reason why you classify it a no index page. It just seems counter productive to no index that page or a group of pages, but yet encourage social media to link to it.

                Heck no one wants to go back later and optimize a page that should have been optimized to begin with. Normally we use a template when building a web page so that all of items we want to index for are conveniently available to drop into the page being built.

                A sound strategy of how pages are linked, keywords to use for each category, and titled will in the long run be easier to maintain, and make upgrading later so much more easy, rather than trying to go back and change an ever increasing mountain of pages later as your strategy changes.

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

                  I think you hit the nail on the head with your last line. I would do it just for the social share pulling up the snippet that you have crafted versus some random part of the page getting ripped out of it.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 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

                  • Chophel

                    My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.

                    Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages.  I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
                    {YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php

                    Technical SEO | | Chophel
                    0
                  • muzzmoz

                    Indexed pages

                    Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?

                    Technical SEO | | muzzmoz
                    1
                  • A_Q

                    Can you force Google to use meta description?

                    Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?

                    Technical SEO | | A_Q
                    0
                  • SatishSEOSiren

                    Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are not Indexing in Google

                    Hello Every one, I have a Wordpress website in which i installed All in SEO plugin and wrote meta titles and descriptions for each and every page and posts and submitted website to index. But after Google crawl the Meta Titles and Descriptions shown by Google are something different that are not found in Content. Even i verified the Cached version of the website and gone through Source code that crawled at that moment. the meta title which i have written is present there. Apart from this, the same URL's are displaying perfect meta titles and descriptions which i wrote in Yahoo and Bing Search Engines. Can anyone explain me how to resolve this issue. Website URL: thenewyou (dot) in Regards,

                    Technical SEO | | SatishSEOSiren
                    0
                  • Dan-Lawrence

                    Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)

                    Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan

                    Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
                    0
                  • jmueller

                    Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?

                    Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
                    our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
                    Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
                    The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
                    First?
                    Last?
                    None? Thanks a lot,
                    Jan

                    Technical SEO | | jmueller
                    0
                  • rhoadesjohn

                    How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages

                    We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th.  It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?

                    Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn
                    0
                  • TalkInThePark

                    De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?

                    Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
                    www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
                    www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
                    And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
                    TalkInThePark

                    Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
                    0

                  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.