Meta Description Issues

@anthyx

We’re sorry to hear that your website has been facing meta description and ranking issues.

Just to confirm, is your website being hosted on SiteGround? We asked because there was an ongoing issue with websites hosted with SiteGround as tweeted on their social media platform. They seems to have resolved the problem. Considering this case could you please resubmit your sitemap in Google Search Console and monitor if the issue persists.

If hosting is different and the issue persists, could you please let us know if you’re seeing any crawl errors in your Google Search Console report lately and what they are.

Please provide us with screenshots that highlight the issue you are experiencing. You can use any image sharing service like https://pasteboard.co/, https://snag.gy/, https://imgur.com/, https://snipboard.io/, or even upload the screenshot to your own website. Once you upload it an image sharing service, please share the link to the image here.

Hello Suwash,

my site is hosted by NameHero.

I’m not seeing any errors reported in Search Console:
‘Coverage’ 0 Errors 0 Valid with Warnings 147 Valid 236 Excluded
‘Manual actions’ No issues detected
‘Security Issues’ No issues detected

The main problem is that all my pages are still not ranked by google, meaning that they don’t appear at all in the search results anymore. This problem started just after 2/3 days spent re-indexing the pages to get the correct meta descriptions (also this problem is still there).

For example, a couple of my ex top ranking pages are completely disappeared:
If i google “argentine asado webfoodculture” or “docg wines webfoodculture”, I don’t get the link to the pages at all!

My site and its users trend are basically crippled, without any apparent cause.

I’m sending you some reports.

https://pasteboard.co/eK6gKf0FXz4v.jpg
https://pasteboard.co/7S4UpObKa50b.jpg
https://pasteboard.co/r1Bd7mCkEPcP.jpg
https://pasteboard.co/bZHCsHiLcyzh.jpg

Any help is well accepetd.

Many thanks in advance.

A.

Hi @anthyx

We did a site: search for your website here, and it is showing 234 results being listed.

Please do note that the meta description can appear differently in the search results from what you’ve defined it with the Yoast SEO plugin, for a whole lot of different reasons. You can learn more about it here – https://yoast.com/help/my-meta-descriptions-arent-showing-up-in-the-search-result-pages/

Unfortunately, there are lots of ranking factors that influence the possible rankings and traffic for your website, all which are outside the scope of our plugin, so we really would need to investigate further as to why there is this sudden drop in impressions, which is outside our scope of plugin support here. The index coverage report from Google Search Console would be a better indicator to let you know if there are any issues with your site – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203/

Hello Michael,

in the article you just linked, your collegue says:

“But sometimes Google has a mind of its own. In some cases, it may decide to show a search result snippet that does not match what you’ve written.”

Well, in my case, 90% of the meta descriptions that come come out with different searches criteria (I often use page keyword + websitename) is completely different from the meta description I inserted using yoast.

I frequently get descriptions that don’t describe, even vaguely, the actual content of the page. Sometimes I get the “alt” value of the page, or the content of a banner (!).

So, I have tried to insert new meta descriptions in google reindexing them with the search console tool. After this, a few articles finally have the right descriptions, meanwhile many other pages (90% of my site), don’t appear in google search results anymore.

The latter in not your problem, clearly, but the fact that great part of the meta descriptions are different from those I insert in Yoast, could be.

Any advise is precious, thanks a lot in advance.

Hi @anthyx

Search term manipulation is one of the factors as to why Google would decide to output a different meta description in the search results. We recommend using the SITE: operator and if you are getting the expected meta description, then that means that the meta description tag we are outputting is correct – https://yoast.com/help/my-meta-descriptions-arent-showing-up-in-the-search-result-pages/#search-term

There’s not much we can do if Google decided to ignore your preferred meta description, except to advise to continually refine and hone your meta descriptions, in hopes of Google and the other search engines deeming it as the optimal result, rather than it having to choose to output something else – https://yoast.com/meta-descriptions/

Hello,

This thread has been marked as resolved due to a lack of activity.

You’re always welcome to re-open this topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.

Thanks for understanding!