Faceted navigation, Affiliate links, Meta descriptions - Oh My!
-
Hi, I have recently come across an issue with the faceted navigation / dynamic URLs for one of my client sites:
From a top level category you can filter by product material, size, type and colour. The URLs which are generated go a little something like this: www.domainname.co.uk/category.aspx?finish=leather&colour=--+no+filter+--
When selected, a 'facet' 302 redirects from the main category URL (no canonical tags in place yet - working on it).
The 'facets' are indexed (although when clicked on from SERPs actually go to a slightly different URL than by navigating there from the site) but they don't display the Meta description in SERPs (instead displaying a list of items from a drop down menu held within a table - probably as it's the first bit of copy the search engines see on the page).
How can I get the Meta description to display in SERPs?
Also, I tried to add a link to a 'facet' from my blog (just for testing purposes) and I got redirected to the page via their affiliate program.
Ideally I want to 'link build' to these pages both internally and via the clients blog but it seems as though there'll be no value in it.
Has anyone come across this before and if so, what can I do about it?
FYI they are using IIS 6 with asp.net
Thanks in advance!
-
Donford's answer is good then - they're probably ignoring those meta description tags as not relevant to the search query. So it's not that they won't display them (assuming they're correctly set up) it's more that they're ignoring them as they're not relevant.
From the horse's mouth: "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
-
Yes there is a meta description - it's the same one as for the main category though, before any filters are aplied. Obv I will look at providing unique descriptions for all of the facets but until I can work out how to get SEs to display them...
-
Is there a meta description tag actually being generated?
-
HI Laura,
I can only comment on one question asked... " How can I get the Meta description to display in Serps?"
Google will use whatever they feel most appropriate for their users. The meta description does hold value, but when Google is returning results to its searchers they will try to return relevant snippets based on what the user searched for.
Example:
Your webpage is about Pajamas and the user searches for Banana Pajamas Google may ignore your Meta description "Family Friendly Pajamas available in cotton and silk for age 2 to adult"And return "banana pajamas....print sizes kids small..available in standard banana print, adult themes and more.."
Remember search engines first priority is the users, not the websites.
Hope that helps with that question. I leave the other stuff for somebody more experienced in ASP.. I'm a php person myself.
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
-
Linking from purchased businesses to my own
Hi All, An SEO and Google guidelines question. We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site. Will this bring a manual action from Google? It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were. So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrendaLtd2 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Link Building Question
Hey Moz'ers, I have created several blogs on different domains for the purpose of writing good content articles that contain 2-3 links per article that go back to my website. It has been up for about 3-4 weeks. I am not seeing my results/links showing up in OSE, is this because it still needs more time or is there something else I could be advised to look into? In theory these blogs will only contain 2-3 links from each domain to the site. I was also going to make sure the anchor text per link is different (keyword, brand name, random anchor like click here). Side note: How does this system sound as part of one small aspect to link building? red flags? Thanks for all the responses and advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Improve change my Meta Description shows in SERP
I feel my meta descriptions are descriptive and fairly represent the info on each page of my site. However, Google frequently includes this "20+ items" in front of the snippet. I run a job site and each page list 20 jobs. What if I include a bit of coding in the Meta Description to include "Latest Jobs Posted TODAY's DATE" - since the jobs listed on the page will include a date. On each page there is also option to "Create Email Alert" and "save Jobs" maybe I should include writing about that as well? I have read all Google's documents on the importance of making Meta Des relevant for the page etc, so any good insight how increase my chances of getting the meta des displayed in the SERP would be appreciated. thank you, Kristian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to build URL links too dilute link profile???
One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc. I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Meta Description In Blog Feed
The SEOmoz crawl tool is giving me a lot of crawl errors because my blog feed and my blog tags do not have meta descriptions. Can you even give this type of content meta descriptions? If so how can you do it, as this content is created dynamically by Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
Googlebot + Meta-Refresh
Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler1