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Meta description not showing in SERPs.

by foxtrot3
5 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
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Meta description not showing in SERPs.

Wordpress site with platinum SEO.

Meta description IS entered in box provided by platinum seo pack. Meta description IS present in source code of page, but description shown in serps (both Google and Yahoo) is just random text from the page.

I'm stumped.

Here's a screenshot of platinum seo options http://i.imgur.com/hCiDL.jpg

I had the "autogenerate descriptions" box checked before, but just unchecked it.
I had never noticed this before. Don't know if it has any effect.

.
#description #meta #serps #showing
  • Profile picture of the author Power Solutions
    I recently learned this the hard way myself. If you have multiple meta description tags and the last one is empty kablooie no meta description for you. This is a problem when you have themes and plugins competing to provide meta tags. Look at all of your theme / plugin options and make sure everything except the SEO plugin is turned off. Even then some badly programmed themes will misbehave. In which case you have no option to either switch themes or go hunting around in the code. Goodluck.
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    • Profile picture of the author foxtrot3
      @khawaja1971 - Thanks for your input. I rooted around in my theme and in the plugins but couldn't find anything that stood out, so I did some more digging.

      I've spent most of the weekend trying to figure this out and I Think I've found the solution. And (drum roll) the answer is - you have to use your primary keyword, or at least part of it, in your meta description. Why? Because the search engines (all of them) will try to match the search term being used to the meta description. Unless it finds some words or phrases in common between the two, it WILL NOT use the pre programmed meta description. It will go into the page and extract some random meaningless verbage and use that as the description. I've seen this on my own site.

      Put another way - If the SE doesn't think that what YOU have written in your meta description is relevant to the content of your site, then they won't use it even though it's in the source code exactly as you wrote it.

      I proved this to myself by doing a search in G using the first 5 words of my pre programmed description as a search term. My site came up with the pre programmed description ! When I search for the site using it's primary KW as a search term, the site is listed with some meaningless verbage from the site as a description.

      So naturally I've rewritten my description to include my primary KW.

      I'm 99% sure what I've written here is accurate. I'll know for sure in a few days. Here's the site that put me on this path -

      Get More Traffic to Your WordPress Site With Meta Description Tags

      Big Brother (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) is watching you! Like it or not.


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  • Profile picture of the author xtrapunch
    Search engines use the description meta tag only as a reference. The actual description shown in search pages will depend on the keyword searched by the user. The keyword is then highlighted in the description. Nothing abnormal here.
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    • Profile picture of the author foxtrot3
      @xtrapunch - NOW I am aware of that. Your short explanation is exactly what I needed to know when I started this quest. Thanks for your input.


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  • Profile picture of the author Power Solutions
    This is definitely a new tidbit of knowledge for myself as well. Thanks!
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