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 descriptions from Google SERPs
-
Hullo all,
I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully.
Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs.
Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap!
Thank you in advance!
-
Hi, yes Google does not care about the keywords meta tag but abusing it is also not recommended as some other search engines still consider this tag a little bit. Moreover, abusing or over optimizing keywords meta tag tells a lot about the intent of a webmaster which is even more dangerous.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
No, as long as you're not also spamming your page copy with your specific target keywords. Nonetheless, it doesn't look very professional.
-
We don't even bother populating that section any more. Now, that said, Bing does care about them to some degree, so it depends how much you may care about that search engine.
Matt Cutts has specifically said Google doesn't care about meta keywords, so I find it surprising that it'd be used to penalize.
-
More relevance while leaning towards click through rate/call to action. It's a balance.
-
Thank you Devanur, I shall definitely look into this. I do have a question though- if Google doesn't really care about the keywords meta tag, then it shouldn't matter what I have written in it, right? So do you think I'll still be in potential danger of an over optimisation penalty, keep this in mind?
-
So the only way out would be to have more relevant meta descriptions, right? Any words on that?
Thank you Chris!
-
Thank you PremioOscar. Will keep this in mind.
-
Chris has it spot on..
Was just curious at the keywords meta tag on your home page:
With this kind of keywords meta tag you are definitely inviting an over optimization penalty. Moreover, you can safely drop the keywords meta tag and its of little to no use these days and Google does not care about it.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
suchde, as says premiooscar, it is not a given that Google uses your meta description in the snippet. In fact, in Google's own words, "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." In fact, you can find that for each different search query that your page comes as a result, you can have a different snippet--it could be the fully from the meta description, fully from the page copy, or a combination of page copy and meta description info.
-
Hello there,
Sometimes Google picks up other information from the page rather than using the meta description when it considers that your meta description are not very relevant for what customers have looked for.
Just make your meta descriptions more relevant.
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
-
Favicon not showing in google serps
Hi, I have a website where the favicon is not showing in the google mobile serps. It's appearing the default icon instead (world icon). This is the tag I have place in the head section of the website: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> The size of the favicon is 48x48 and it's appearing correctly in the browser tag. I've checked that the google robot can crawl it and in the server logs I can see requests from the "Google Favicon" user-agent. Has anyone had this same problem? Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dMaLasp0 -
If you use canonicals do the meta descriptions need to be different?
For example, we have 3 different subsites with the same pages. We will put canonicals so they reference the main pages. Do the meta descriptions have to be different for each of the three pages? How does Google handle meta data when using canonicals?
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?
In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location. It seems to have disappeared in the past few days? Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Phone number in Meta Description - Is it a good idea?
Is it a best practice to place your company's phone number in the meta description for a page? Are there any rules as to what is acceptable for meta tags? One of our competitors recently started doing this but for some reason I think it might be against Google's guidelines. They (competitor) is also engaging in web spam, plagiarizing our content, and other black hat techniques so I'm leery of anything they do.
Technical SEO | | mathamatix0 -
Templates for Meta Description, Good or Bad?
Hello, We have a website where users can browse photos of different categories. For each photo we are using a meta description template such as: Are you looking for a nice and cool photo? [Photo name] is the photo which might be of interest to you. And in the keywords tags we are using: [Photo name] photos, [Photo name] free photos, [Photo name] best photos. I'm wondering, is this any safe method? it's very difficult to write a manual description when you have 3,000+ photos in the database. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TheSEOGuy10 -
How to display the full structure of website on Google serps
I have been searching around but unable to gather information as to how we can control or list top pages of a website on Google's first page , i.e. if we type seomoz in google , we can see the main listing with 6 subdomain listings , which link to Blog , Seo tool , Beginner Seo guide , Learn Seo , Pricing & Plans and login My question is can we control these listings i.e. what to display and what not , and if yes how can we make this type of visibility on first page , by using html or xml sitemaps or theirs something mostly websites are missing. Cause this type of data is coming up for very less websites and mostly websites are with single urls. c43Ki.jpg
Technical SEO | | ngupta10 -
Google truncating or altering meta title - affect rankings?
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure) Anyway, the rankings for the home page have dropped quite a bit. I'm wondering if the change that Google makes affects rankings (i.e. name of site doesn't have all the keywords).
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0