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
-
Missing description + Missing or invalid H1
So I have more than 1.4K Meta Data Issues that states that there is "Missing Description" together with "Missing or invalid H1" and I have spent so many hours trying to figure this out, still no luck.. The problem seems to be to add a description in a specific tag, for example: https://www.troyhoffman.com/blog/tag/courage The platform I use (Squarespace) doesn't allow me to add a description to e specific tag. Any ideas on how I can fix this problems? 5TBfuDj
Moz Pro | | DaniellaSerquen1 -
Source page showsI have 2 h1 tags on my page. I can only find one.
When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens
Moz Pro | | Coot0 -
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 -
Meta Tag Descriptions not being found in Moz Crawls
Hey guys, I have been managing a few websites and have input them into Moz for crawl reports, etc. For a while I have noticed that we were getting a gratuitous amount of errors when it came to the number of missing meta tags. It was numbering in the 200's. The sites were in place before I got here and a lot of the older posts no one had even attempted to include tags, links of the page or anything. As they are all Wordpress Sites and they all already had the Yoast/Wordpress SEO plug-in installed on them, I decided I would go through each post and media file one at a time and update their meta tags via the plug in. I personally did this so I know that I added and saved each one, however the Moz crawl reports continue to show that we are missing roughly 200 meta tags. I've seen a huge drop off in 404 errors and stuff since I went through and double checked everything on the sites, however the meta tag errors persist. Is this the case that Moz is not recognizing the tags when it crawls because I used the Yoast Plugin? Or would you say that the plugin is the issue and I should find another way to add meta tags to the pages and posts on the site? My main concern is that if Moz is having issues crawling the sites, is Google also seeing the same thing? The URLS include:
Moz Pro | | MOZ.info
sundancevacationsblog.com
sundancevacationsnews.com
sundancevacationscharities.com Any help would be appreciated!0 -
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 -
Blogger Duplicate Content? and Canonical Tag
Hello: I previously asked this question, but I would love to get more perspectives on this issue. In Blogger, there is an archive page and label(s) page(s) created for each main post. Firstly, does Google, esp. considering Blogger is their product, possibly see the archive and tag pages created in addition to the main post as partial duplicate content? The other dilemma is that each of these instances - main post, archive, label(s) - claim to be the canonical. Does anyone have any insight or experience with this issue and Blogger and how Google is treating the partial duplicates and the canonical claims to the same content (even though the archives and label pages are partial?) I do not see anything in Blogger settings that allows altering these settings - in fact, the only choices in Blogger settings are 'Email Posting' and 'Permissions' (could it be that I cannot see the other setting options because I am a guest and not the blog owner?) Thanks so much everyone! PS - I was not able to add the blog as a campaign in SEOmoz Pro, which in and of itself is odd - and which I've never seen before - could this be part of the issue? Are Blogger free blogs not able to be crawled for some reason via SEOmoz Pro?
Moz Pro | | holdtheonion0 -
Title tag on sitemap.xml
The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !
Moz Pro | | eyepaq1