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 [email protected] 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.
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
-
Why Only Our Homepage Can Be Crawled Showing a Redirect Message as the Meta Title
Hello Everyone, So recently when we checked our domain using a Moz Crawl Test and Screaming Frog only the homepage comes up and the meta title says “You are being redirected to…”. We have several pages that used to come up and when submitting them to GSC no issues come up. The robots.txt file looks fine as well. We thought this might be ‘server’ related but it’s a little out of our field of expertise so we thought we would find out if anyone has any experience with this (ideas of reasons, how to check…etc.) or any potential suggestions. Any extra insight would be really appreciated. Please let us know if there is anything we could provide further details for that might. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thanks in advance. Best,
Moz Pro | | Ben-R0 -
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 -
Need help understanding search filter URL's and meta tags
Good afternoon Mozzers, One of our clients is a real estate agent and on that site there is a search field that will allow a person to search by filtered categories. Currently, the URL structure makes a new URL for each filter option and in my Moz reports I get the report that there is missing meta data. However, the page is the same the filter options are different so I am at a loss as to how to proper tag our site to optimize those URL's. Can I rel canonical the URL's or alt rel them? I have been looking for a solution for a few days now and like I said I am at a loss of how to properly resolve these warning messages, or if I should even be concerned with the warning messages from Moz (obviously I should be concerned, they are warning messages for a reason). Thank you for your assistance in advance!
Moz Pro | | Highline_Ideas0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
Meta keywords no longer in use
Can someone point me to the official article explaining why meta keywords are no longer taken into account by search engines please? I know Moz has indicated that search engines ignore them, but I would like to read a bit more about it - what was the reason behind it and since when.
Moz Pro | | coremediadesign0 -
Some questions on Canonical tag AND 301 redirect
Hi everyone, I'm new here - always loved SEOMoz and glad to be part of the Pro community now. I have 2 questions regarding the Canonical URL tag. Some background info: We used to run an OsCommerce store, and recently migrated to Magento. In doing so, we right away created 301 redirects of the old category pages (OsCommerce) to the new category pages (Magento) via the Magento admin. Example: www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
301 redicrected to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html In Magento admin, we have enabled the Canonical tag for all product and category pages. Here's how Magento sets up the Canonical tag: The URL of interest which we want to rank is:
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html However Magento sets up the canonical tag on this page to point to:
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html When using the SEOMoz On Page Report Card, it pick this up as an error because the Canonical tag is pointing to a different URL. However, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the URL being pointed to
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
has a 301 redirect to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html
which is the URL we wan to rank. So because we set up a 301 redirect of the old-page to the new-page, on the new-page the canonical tag points to the old-page. Question 1)
What are you opinions on this? Do you think this method of setting up the Canonical tag is acceptable? Second question... We use pagination for category pages, so if we have 50 products in one category, we would have 5 pages of 10 products. The URL's would be: www.example.com/new-widget-category.html (which is the SAME as ?p=1)
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=2
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=3
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=4
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=5 Now ALL the URLs above have the canonical tag set as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/new-widget-category" /> However, the content of each page (page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is different because different products are displayed. So far most what I read regarding the Canonical tag is that it is used for pages that have the same content but different URLs. I would hope that Google would combine the content of all 5 pages and view the result as a single URL www.example.com/new-widget-category Question 2) Is using the canonical tag appropriate in the case described above? Thanks !0 -
Meta description tag in rss xml file?
The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>
Moz Pro | | scanlin0