Two basic questions re. Crawl Diagnostic results
-
I'm a novice...I've just run my crawl diagnostics and I wonder how important is it to a) Have meta-descriptions on every page, b) Have all titles less than 70 characters?
Thanks in advance. Dan.
-
Dan,
the meta description is your chance to pitch to your customer and nothing more. It is entirely possible to throw away the benefit a #1 ranking can give you in click through if you meta description lets you down.
Also for me it is very important to keep within the 70 characters limit for the page title as having overly long titles can not only not read correctly in the search results but you may be diluting your affectiveness on targeting a page for a certain topic both to the user and the SE's
-
Thanks both of you, that definitely helps me. Dan.
-
Meta-descriptions are an opportunity for you to instruct the SE's what your page is about specifically. If you leave it blank - they will extract an excerpt that they think applies to the page. Whilst this is ok, it might not be exactly what you want to display on the SERPS.
Use the meta descriptions to make the most of the SERPS page, if you page is about blue widget investment - then your description should have text that is relevant to that term, and contain text that includes or is at least similar to the term - if it is a large page and you leave the field blank - the SE's can pull in a snippet of an entirely different part of the page that isn't relevant at all.
As for titles - If you have old pages that have long titles it can be a bit of a drag redoing them - but if you are continually producing content I would suggest restricting to sub 70 characters from here on from an "adhering to best practices" point of view.
-
In terms of pure SEO Meta Descriptions will have no effect on your rankings. But they are potentially your first chance of presenting your content to users convincing them to come to your site, so in that respect they are important. Search engines will use page content as a meta description if there isn't one and that can be fine, but it isn't always what you want.
Titles are a little more tricky, if you have keywords beyond those 70 characters they are unlikely to be "read" by the spiders, and that is less than ideal, so it's important to try to say what you need within that 70 character limit.
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 Search Results Flip-Flop
For a site we manage, Google can’t seem to decide which of two pages to present for a search for “skid steer attachments.” Almost weekly, it flip-flops from the home page to an interior page (which is a shopping cart category page that we have not actually optimized for the phrase.) The site is berlon.com. Have any of you had a similar experience and, if so, how did you address it? I’ve attached a Moz screen shot that shows the changes. mNfmJoY
Technical SEO | | PKI_Niles0 -
Google Search Results Display URL
Our urls show as www.domain.com/getproduct.aspx?productid=48376 (url #1) in Google search results. When you click on the link and go to the site the URL is www.domain.com/product-name.aspx (url #2) I checked in Google Webmaster Tools (Fetch as Google) and there is a 302 redirect from url #1 to url #2. It also shows a Set-Cookie value, ASP.NET_SessionID= If we make it a 301 redirect instead, will the url displayed in Google search results be the url #2? We need to get rid of the Set-Cookie for crawlers correct?
Technical SEO | | Guy_Huyett0 -
Ajax Crawling | Blocked URLs Spike
http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/ (for example) Hello, I'm concerned that WMT is reporting a large spike in blocked URLs - now reporting more blocked URLs than good URLs. Our product recommendations get generated via an Ajax call and these autogenerated, unique, URLs are rendered in the /recommendations/ folder which sits in the root of our site: http://www.zando.co.za/recommendations/ I can't see how I can prevent Google from calling the Ajax - I can only assume that's what's happening.This is what the code typically looks like:
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Two of Pages Have Been SendBoxed
Hello, I was number 1-2 for my local keyword term, but now im nowhere, those two urls dont even show up in Google search results, my other pages DO, so that is obvious Google sendboxed them, i dont remember doing aggressive non quality link building, and its not a competitive term, since i was number 1 in Google for over 3 months or so i checked this tool and found that two of my urls are in sendbox http://www.searchenginegenie.com/sandbox-checker.htm I was never sendboxed before, can you help me how can i get out of this, since its my client's website, and i have to get those pages up as soon as possible Thank You
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
Indexation question
Hi Guys, i have a small problem with our development website. Our development website is website.dev.website.nl This page shouldn't be indexed bij Google but unfortunately it is. What can i do to deindex it and ask google not to index this website. In the robots.txt or are there better ways to do this? Kind regards Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Questions about root domain setup
Hi There, I'm a recent addition to SEOmoz and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure things out. This whole SEO process has been a bit of a brain burner but its slowly becoming a little more clearer. For awhile I noticed that I was unable to get Open Site Explorer to display information about my site. It mentioned that that there was not enough data for the URL. Too recent of a site, no links, etc. Eventually I changed the the URL to include "www." and it pulled up results. I also noticed that a few of my page warnings are because of duplicate page content. One page will be listed as http://enbphotos.com. The other will be listed as http://www.enbphotos.com. I guess I'm not sure what this all means and how to change it. I'm also not really sure what the terminology even is and something regarding root domain seemed appropriate but I'm not sure if it is accurate. Any help/suggestions/links would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | enbphotos0 -
Understanding the actions needed from a Crawl Report
I've just joined SEOMOZ last week and have not even received my first full-crawl yet, but as you know, I do get the re-crawl report. It shows I have 50 301's and 20 rel canonical's. I'm still very confused as to what I'm supposed to fix...And, all the rel canonical's are my sites main pages, so hence I am still equally confused as to what the canonical is doing and how do I properly setup my site. I'm a technical person and can grasp most things fairly quickly, but on this the light bulb is taking a little while longer to fire-up 🙂 If my question wasn't total jibberish and you can help shed some light, I would be forever grateful. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | apmgsmith0 -
Reading Crawl Diagnostics and Taking Action on results
My site crawl diagnostics are showing a high number of duplicate page titles and content. When i look at the flagged pages, many errors are simply listed from multiple pages of product category search results. This looks pretty normal to me and I am at a loss for understanding how to fix this situation. Can I talk with someone? thanks, Gary
Technical SEO | | GaryQ0