Google not pulling correct Meta Description
-
For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.
Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?
-
If you have an H2 on your page, maybe try to include same or highly similar wording in your meta description and try to avoid any sentences where relevant words to that page (or synonyms of such words) are not found on your page. I have tried with my own site in past and it has worked. No statistical evidence beyond what worked for my own site, but consider giving it a shot.
-
http://www.dmoz.org/ -> It's Open Directory Project, maintained by a community of volunteer editors, basically is directory trusted by the Search engines and many times the description from dmoz is used as snippet in the search results. When you submit a site for dmoz a human will verify and will accept your site only if it follow the guide lines.
Google can still display their own snippet but I think is worthy a try....
-
Sadly, Google often puts in their own snippet for the meta description, and will even change the meta titles on you too, depending on your query. There's often not a whole lot you can do about it, except take comfort that it happens even to sites like apple.com.
-
Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.
-
If Google Understand that your meta description is not as relevant to your page content or search query, they will replace with the content from your page that they understand as more relevant, To solve the issue you can try get list Dmoz, often search engine pull their description from dmoz or rewrite your meta description.
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
-
Google confused by trailing slash
My client has a page with the URL https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/. Google won't index this page because it has detected a canonical at https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training (without the trailing slash). I can't find https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training without the trailing slash anywhere in our site. All the other page URLs end with the slash. How do I sort this out and convince Google that https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/ is the version to index? Thanks in advance for your help, SEO masters! -AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Is the Google results serp broken?
Hi everyone! We've been trying to decipher how many of our pages are indexed by google at the moment. If we do the usual "site:https://www.hobbydb.com" search term, the serp says that we have more than 740,000 pages indexed. However, when I do a deep dive and click through to the last page of results, I can only get to page 54, and then there are no more results. This would mean that I only have 540 pages indexed, not 740,000. We have also done other queries for other sub-sections of our website, and the results also truncate at 50 pages. Has anyone run into this problem? Any suggestions are appreciated! Best, Alex
Technical SEO | | mpchobbydb0 -
My some pages are not showing cached in Google, WHY?
I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status.. you can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.
Technical SEO | | 1akal0 -
Google not using redirect
We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Very strange: META descriptions not showing
Hello, Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone. I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on. I tested some things: Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page). Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions. More information: The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it). Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown) Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those). Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection. Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
Crawl-delay: 2 May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't. I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change. I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
Thanks in advance. Marcel0 -
Updating/chaning title tags & meta descriptions
Hi there, Can altering title tags and meta descriptions too often have a negative impact on page ranking? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ZAG0 -
Special Characters in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Do special characters, such as the "&" symbol or a "," in title tags and meta descriptions negatively affect your ranking in search engines? Any feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ZAG1 -
Adding Google + to SEOmoz
I wanted to add my google + signature to every post I make on SEOmoz and I think every user should do the same... Two reasons why... Google helps our existence so we should help theirs. If someone likes what I wrote or vice versa we should be able to follow each other in a simple click. In my opinion all blogs forum posts etc... should Lead to a user not a website, this will prevent spam and help people network. In other words blog spammers and forum spammers will be SOL (Which they all ready are lol).
Technical SEO | | SEODinosaur0