Overlength Meta description
-
Hi, Has anyone got an answer to why a meta description would be showing characters well above 160. The current Meta description is only 10 characters in length but I wanted to know why Google would display so many characters.
Cheers
Phil
-
Gary is absolutely correct. Google can alter your page Titles and Descriptions if they find are not appropriate and can even fetch descriptions from other prominent websites where your website is listed with a description. The best example of such prominent website is the Open Directory Project, Dmoz.org.
So its always recommended to come up with relevant page titles and descriptions that are unique for all your pages.
Most of the time, Google will take the titles and descriptions mentioned by the webmaster in the title tag and description meta tag, but there is no guarantee that this happens 100% of the time. If your website is listed on dmoz and you do not want Google to pickup the description from there, you can use the page level robots meta tag as follows:
Similarly if you do not want Google to pickup the description from Yahoo directory,
Use your page titles and descriptions in such a way that they force the visitor to click on your website in the search results. The title should contain your target term in it. See to it that the Titles and Descriptions have a strong compelling message. Using titles and descriptions optimally can have dramatic improvement in CTR from search results.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Maybe your cms is displaying content as a meta description? Can you show a link?
-
If your description tag is only 10 characters, then Google algo will not find it useful and will replace it with what it thinks is best. It can do this for your Title tags too. Sometimes using Dmoz.
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
-
Adding CTAs in Meta Descriptions
Whats peoples opinions about putting Call To Cations CTAs in Meta Descriptions, and does this ever occur a Google penalty, as it can sometimes look a bit clickbait. For example I am looking at a site which currently has this meta description Meta Description: For more information on our sustainable, natural office furniture, click here to get in contact. Is this kind of description ranking unfriendly, Ive seen them used a lot but IM not a big fan of this myself. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong1 -
Can I reuse meta description tag on another site?
Hi....lets say i sell widgets and on my site i have redWidgets, blueWidgets and greenWidgets. Each of these widget page's has a meta description tag that seems to help click through. I now have a different site that would like to do a right up about each widget and will dedicate a independent page to each widget. Can i safely provide them with the original meta descriptions (from my original site) for each widget i have on my site to then use on these "right up" pages (as they seem to work well and are informative of the subject matter). I am not sure if this is a seo issue or not. I would think not but would appreciate any input. thank you
On-Page Optimization | | nomad-2023230 -
Good CTAs for Meta-Descriptions: Direct, Indirect, Narrow, Broad?
It is no secret that good meta descriptions should be written to incite the searcher to click on the result without misleading them. Time and again I read that there are measurable effects by including "strong" CTAs (calls to action). What constitutes a call to action seems by some to be taken really narrow (i.e. "Click here to learn more!" - a very specific action that is spelled out) and by others rather broadly ("... Offer available till December 31" - only implicit, the action [buying/securing] not even mentioned). I now wondered: Many "guides" still recommend rather blunt calls like "Click here", "Read more", "Discover how". Personally I find those really unattractive and often a waste of space. However, I am not the benchmark and favour the informational side perhaps a little too strongly. Do those direct but general CTAs really work well in every case* or should one be more elaborate/indirect? I am looking forward of hearing your experience/opinion! Nico Yes, of course it is "test, test, test" and to some degree each case is different; looking for general patterns, though 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | netzkern_AG0 -
Anyone knows why our meta deta are not displayed properly ?
Hello For some reasons our home description does not appear properly https://www.google.com/search?q=joomgeek&qscrl=1&gws_rd=ssl it looks like this http://awesomescreenshot.com/05c3n5fg65 I've resubmit my sitemap to G webmaster Tools and it still the same. However when I bing it I see the proper one. What can be wrong ?
On-Page Optimization | | JoomGeek0 -
Adding meta description tags to Drupal 6 content
It looks as if a quick improvement to the (inherited) site that I manage would be to add meta description tags to all our pages. But I don't see a user-friendly way to modify the html headers from within Drupal. I'm debating whether to interpose CSS code between Drupal and the final html content, but I'd face a steep learning curve on CSS. Can you suggest a more excellent approach? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | marcellu
John0 -
Can you expound why i have to avoid using meta keywords?
I'm using the on page report card and it tells me that i have to avoid using meta keywords.I'm a little bit confused. I thought that it's important to use it all the time so search engine can better index the site. if I use SEO Quake it will tell me in the diagnostic test that I need to input keywords.
On-Page Optimization | | jsevilla0 -
Changing of title page and description
Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing. Any secret techniques to speeding this up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is there a tool out there I could use to help me compose unique meta tags in bulk?
We have a website that has hundreds of crawl errors due to duplicate meta tags. I could do with a tool to help compose unique ones in bulk so we don't exceed the recommended character limit and follow any other best practices.
On-Page Optimization | | WebDesignBirmingham0