Meta Description not getting fetched

Hello!

When migrating SEO plugins, Google may find it needs to reprocess your pages and their metadata. Before they complete that, they can already take snippets from the content they crawled (and didn’t process) — sometimes parts that aren’t desirable.

To learn more, read https://developers.google.com/search/docs/basics/how-search-works. It’s not quite as in-depth as I’d like to have found on this topic, nor am I fond of their terminology (“indexing” means “processing”, but they can already “index” your page without “indexing”).

Nevertheless, if this issue persists after a week (or two), do let me know! So far, I couldn’t find obvious issues why Google would keep ignoring your metadata.

Hi @cybr,

I waited for more than a month now. Majority of my descriptions are not getting fetched. It is working when i try it with other SEO plugins like Yoast but for SEO framework, i am not able to figure it out. Please help me out here.

Hey, I had a look at your website and there are a couple of things to note. First, it is pretty weird your test page is indexed, and on top. You should deindex it asap. There are some other fairly noticeable issues. There are more, but they have nothing to do with SEO plugins.

Second, you deal with spammy topic — visa, migration, etc. Google is cautions about those types of sites, since they are filled with scam. I suspect you are either not getting crawled or you are sandboxed.

Note that all SEO plugins do essentially the same thing, we add SEO metadata to your source code. It is unlikely that would cause any issue with Google or any other search engine.

Look at this page, and it’s source code. The data from SEO plugin are filled properly, and frankly, the output is the same from all SEO plugins. I don’t even know if it is made by TSF.

There is a very good chance this has nothing to do with SEO plugin, whichever you might want to use. Your website might need a proper audit. I would start with Google/Bing webmaster tools and if you are serious about your business, you might want to consider using tools like ahrefs, screaming frog and others to uncover potential issues.

However, we are not giving up on you. If you provide us with more info, we will try to investigate further. Google webmaster tools should give you an idea about the crawl problems, post us a screenshot if you will; and we can move from there.

Once again, apologies you run into issues.

Hi Pierre,

Our site is available on Google and there are no issues as not getting crawled or being sandboxed. The test page error happened from the developers and we will be fixing it. The only concern here is the about the descriptions and yes, we use ahref as well.

Hello!

Description snippets on Google Search will change depending on your search query (among other things). If a keyword you used to search your website for isn’t present in the description you’ve written, Google will substitute your description with random pieces of text from your page that closely match the search query. They do this only after your page is parsed.

We tackle this issue with our (Premium) Focus extension, which can recognize ‘amazing’ as ‘excellent’ and ‘impressive’: https://tsf.fyi/e/focus/#usage/meta-description.

For example, your description is this:

My item is amazing.

And you use Google Search for this:

amazing item

Then Google will likely display your description.

If, however, your search query is this:

bad item

Then Google will likely display some of your page’s content as the description snippet (explaining a “bad item,” or whatever). This helps drive users to your website since you cover both the ‘amazing’ and ‘bad’ items.

If you want to ascertain that your description is fetched correctly by Google, then you’ll have to perform a “site:”-query. For example:

site:https://example.com/path-to-page/

Speaking of Ahrefs, they wrote an in-depth article about this: https://ahrefs.com/blog/meta-description/.