Meta Descriptions Not Appearing

Hi Julia!

We checked the source code of your site and we can see that the Yoast SEO plugin is generating the appropriate meta description. However, a separate description is also being generated by another SEO plugin. That may be where the issue is.

We don’t recommend having two SEO programs running at the same time as this can cause issues such as duplicate metadata which confuses Google to crawl the correct metadata.

Hey! Thanks so much for your quick reply! I don’t have any other seo plugins installed. The only other meta description editing options are from the Nimble Theme Editor “SEO Settings” and they are all disabled. I also use pretty much all of the same plugin setups on all of my sites and don’t have the same problem anywhere else.

Can you point out where the other meta description is? I am only seeing the ones inside of the Yoast tags. IE:
“<meta name=”description” content=”Wilsondale Apartments offers exceptional apartment living in sleek, modern and spacious one, two and three-bedroom apartment homes in Hampton, Virginia.”>”

and

“<meta property=”og:description” content=”Wilsondale Apartments offers exceptional apartment living in sleek, modern and spacious one, two and three-bedroom apartment homes in Hampton, Virginia.”>”

But they are both within the “this site is optimized by Yoast SEO” tags.

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by jcrohrer.

Also, I’d like to note that even though the meta description is ‘appearing’ in the code, the problem I am having is having it being ‘seen’ by Google and other SEO tools. For example, if you run the site through https://web.dev/measure/ it says my meta description is missing.

However if you run this site through, https://www.rwmorristreeservice.com/
Which has pretty much all of the same plugins and was developed by the same developer, using Nimble, around the same time that he created these other sites, it doesn’t cite the missing meta description issue.

I have already looked into the code and can’t find any notable differences since he uses pretty much the same template across the board.

Thanks for your clarification. We looked at the relevant website again and can confirm that there’s no duplicate meta description anymore. We can confirm that Yoast SEO is generating the following meta description on the relevant website’s frontpage.

<meta name=" description" content="Wilsondale Apartments offers exceptional apartment living in sleek, modern and spacious one, two and three-bedroom apartment homes in Hampton, Virginia." />

Please note the above meta description is the one that the search engine will use and the one you have shared before property=”og:description” is specific to the social media sites like Facebook only.

That said, we have tested the front page of your website in Google search and see that Google isn’t showing the relevant meta description that you have defined for the relevant page. This is a common issue where Google modifies the SEO title and meta description in the search results based on the search terms and many other factors. We are afraid to say that there’s no straightforward way to fix this. However, you can force Google to recrawl the relevant page of your website from Google Search Console to see whether this resolves the issue for you. You can find the relevant guide here https://yoast.com/help/fetch-as-googlebot/.

Thanks for your help! Unfortunately I’ve already tried submitting for Google to crawl the site after many of different attempts I’ve made to fix the issue.

Do you have any thoughts about the ‘missing’ meta description based on the web.dev tool I mentioned above? Even though the meta description is appearing in the code, it can’t been seen by that tool or any other SEO tools I use. They all say my meta description is missing.

I don’t have the same problem with that other site I mentioned which uses essentially the same exact setup. I’ve also never had this problem with Google before even though I have been doing seo on wordpress and using yoast for 3 years now.

I really don’t think this a problem with Google not choosing to use my suggested description. I don’t think it ‘sees’ my meta description at all.

I know you guys don’t have all of the answers. I have just troubleshooted this issue to death and come up empty, so I am looking for all the help I can get!

We are afraid to say that we are unable to confirm why the 3rd party tool web.dev is saying there’s no meta description even though there’s one. So, you might want to reach out to the relevant website support for clarification on this.

As mentioned already, the issue you are currently experiencing is common even though you haven’t experienced it before. We have a troubleshooting guide here that you can follow to see if that helps you with anything https://yoast.com/help/my-meta-descriptions-arent-showing-up-in-the-search-result-pages/.

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.