Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
-
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description.
It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following:
name="Description" content="
I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as:
name="description" content="
Thoughts?
-
It's the wordtracker chrome add-on called scout. I was using it to find high performing keywords and decided to run it on my own site.That's when I noticed no meta description being highlighted. There are no settings in the add-on though
I did some more reading and w3.org states it is good practise to use lower case for all HTML elements and attribute names, so I'm going to change it. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.2
Better to follow good practice than bad.
-
Hi!
According to http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/documents.html#case-insensitivity HTML tags are not case sensitive, but it could be that your tracker software is looking for all lowercase, as this is considered good coding practice. Is it possible to configure in the tracking tool, perhaps?
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
-
Canonical tags for duplicate listings
Hi there, We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control. The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages. The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed. Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place? This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together. What are your thoughts? Thanks Issa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Link title tags on devices - product category page
I saw that any big page doesn't have a title tag on the product link on the category page. Title tag has any advantages on internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar0 -
Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
Hi Guys, We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase. www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/ www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/ We will use 301 redirect for old to new. Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps. The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure. My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change. We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic. I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise, Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure? By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ? How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year? Thanking you in advance, Sohail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll1 -
Weirdist Meta Description I've Seen in a SERP
For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for. I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more. The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not? I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford1 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country?
A customer of ours has a website in Belgium. There two main languages in Belgium: Dutch and French.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
At first there was only a Dutch version with a .be extension. Right now they are implementing the French Belgium version on the URL website.be/fr. All of the content and comments will be translated. Also the URL’s will change from Dutch to French, so you've got two URL’s with the same content but in another language. Question: Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country? I think Google will understand this is just for the usability for a Multilanguage country. What do you guys think???0 -
Alt tags
What options do I have if all my images are pulled in by tags background images? It's a customized CMS and the designer put all images in the CSS so he would have more control over image size. I would like to somehow add description elements to the alt tags Thank, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Can you use more than one meta robots tag per page?
If you want to add both "noindex, follow" and "noopd" should you add two meta robots tags or is there a way to combine both into one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0