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.
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
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
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_Q0 -
Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?
In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location. It seems to have disappeared in the past few days? Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
New (google) local SERPs has 40 character limit on title length
Should i change my all the page titles for pages that show up in local SERPs to reflect this new limit? Is there any benefit to leaving it at the old limit and having more keywords in there? Or would there be benefit to conforming to google's new standard and having shorter titles?
Technical SEO | | A Former User0