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 descriptions from Google SERPs
-
Hullo all,
I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully.
Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs.
Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap!
Thank you in advance!
-
Hi, yes Google does not care about the keywords meta tag but abusing it is also not recommended as some other search engines still consider this tag a little bit. Moreover, abusing or over optimizing keywords meta tag tells a lot about the intent of a webmaster which is even more dangerous.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
No, as long as you're not also spamming your page copy with your specific target keywords. Nonetheless, it doesn't look very professional.
-
We don't even bother populating that section any more. Now, that said, Bing does care about them to some degree, so it depends how much you may care about that search engine.
Matt Cutts has specifically said Google doesn't care about meta keywords, so I find it surprising that it'd be used to penalize.
-
More relevance while leaning towards click through rate/call to action. It's a balance.
-
Thank you Devanur, I shall definitely look into this. I do have a question though- if Google doesn't really care about the keywords meta tag, then it shouldn't matter what I have written in it, right? So do you think I'll still be in potential danger of an over optimisation penalty, keep this in mind?
-
So the only way out would be to have more relevant meta descriptions, right? Any words on that?
Thank you Chris!
-
Thank you PremioOscar. Will keep this in mind.
-
Chris has it spot on..
Was just curious at the keywords meta tag on your home page:
With this kind of keywords meta tag you are definitely inviting an over optimization penalty. Moreover, you can safely drop the keywords meta tag and its of little to no use these days and Google does not care about it.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
suchde, as says premiooscar, it is not a given that Google uses your meta description in the snippet. In fact, in Google's own words, "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content." In fact, you can find that for each different search query that your page comes as a result, you can have a different snippet--it could be the fully from the meta description, fully from the page copy, or a combination of page copy and meta description info.
-
Hello there,
Sometimes Google picks up other information from the page rather than using the meta description when it considers that your meta description are not very relevant for what customers have looked for.
Just make your meta descriptions more relevant.
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
-
Favicon not showing in google serps
Hi, I have a website where the favicon is not showing in the google mobile serps. It's appearing the default icon instead (world icon). This is the tag I have place in the head section of the website: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> The size of the favicon is 48x48 and it's appearing correctly in the browser tag. I've checked that the google robot can crawl it and in the server logs I can see requests from the "Google Favicon" user-agent. Has anyone had this same problem? Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dMaLasp0 -
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?
Technical SEO | | ellenu0 -
Google SERPs Show Different Title
Hi Guys, Can anyone please help with my situation. My domain is www.greedybins.com.au. I had title setup in every pages differently, and it has been 2 months since I made the changes. I keep checking by using site:www.greedybins.com.au in search. So far, only 1 title that been show correctly in SERPs. I used SEO Yoast before, I changed to All In One SEO Pack plugin, the titles are changing, but still not accurate as I made it. Somehow Google altered it by itself. I have tried fetch and submit sitemap couple times from Google Search Console. Could anyone please advise?
Technical SEO | | ray.soms0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePunditCan you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
Links under Meta Description when performing a search
Doing research for clients, I have came across seeing sites displaying hyperlinks underneath their own meta description. keywords that I have googled that result with hyperlinks displaying under meta descriptions: Google'd: iacquire (brand) bmw wheels (Beyern Wheels, position 1) aftermarket bmw wheels (MMR Wheels, position 2) These companys have hyperlinks underneath their descriptions. Anyone have any ideas why this happens or how it happens?
Technical SEO | | frnprz0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
How do I add meta descriptions to Archives in Wordpress?
My most recent crawl returned a number of 'missing meta description' errors, and when I checked individual URLs, it turned out they were Wordpress Archived pages - for individual months and days (e.g. http:// .../2011/01). What's the best way to go about adding descriptions to these pages, if at all? Or should I have these pages not be indexed? I am using the All in One SEO plugin, so maybe there is an easy fix through this plugin, or it may be the cause of these errors? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance! **EDIT After looking it up further, I have decided to use noindex for Archives, which should solve my problem right? Or is there a benefit to having those archived pages?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0