Having this problem too; meta description for the the homepage is a post title, and even the alt tag of a past article.
Good job with the PDF as well OP – hope you don’t mind me latching on to this thread 😀
Google isn’t the only one that is messed up!
I just searched “Essential About WordPress – Three Infographics, One Video” on Bing and the first result on page one was:
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The Increasing Importance of Social Media to SMEs | Social Media …
socialmediarevolver.com/increasing-importance-social-media-smes
1 day ago
13/07/2012 · Essential About WordPress – Three Infographics, One Video; 7 Steps for Creating Effective Social Media Strategy; Social Media’s Growing Impact on Relationships # …
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This is my latest blog post with a totally wrong description. It is the description of the post I searched for but in a wrong post!
The same thing happened with Yahoo!
Check them out:
http://socialmediarevolver.com/essential-about-wordpress/
and
http://socialmediarevolver.com/increasing-importance-social-media-smes/
and search for their full post titles, and you’ll know what I mean!
I am totally confused now! I wish someone from Yoast would comment on these.
Nick
(@kercommunications)
Check the source code of your post to see if the meta description is what you want it to be. If it is, then it isn’t a problem with the plugin.
Google and other search engines do not always use the meta description exactly – just as a “suggestion”. Google will often show whatever you searched for as part of the description under the link in SERPs.
That is why when you search for your article’s title, it shows that in the description.
Search for the URL of the post and it will probably show whatever you have set in the meta description.
BTW, Joost is on vacation for 3 weeks (just saw a tweet from him regarding that). Probably should have checked in here one last time within the last week, since the current version of the plugin does seem to be causing trouble for a lot of users.
I am currently using the most recent development version on a few sites and it seems to be a little less problematic for the strip category base 404 problems.
Please check your blog; site:yourdomain.com in google, and if the result is the same as the description of the article you wrote on the control panel yoast plugin, it means that this plugin works. But for a certain keyword, it is the right of google to determine, not entirely up to the description of articles written on yoast seo. CMIIW
Thanks for your help Nick and Sinusrest!
Ok, that ‘site:yourdomain.com’ enquiry shows correct description as set in Yoast.
So, it’s just another f..up from Google, eh? They really want to lose their search business to Bing, don’t they! I have already replaced the default search engine in Chrome to Bing and I’m hearing lots of similar actions happening.
On the topic of Yoast whould you guys know a decent tutorial how to set it up? Joost’s tutorial is getting way too old now. Mainly I’m worried how to set it up so that I don’t push duplicate stuff into SERP’s. I just want to present my blog posts in them, and perhaps categories. That’s it.
The Google search results present the first sentence of the blog post as the Meta Description even though I have programmed a completely different one with Yoast SEO. How is that possible?
@krisolin – Changes you make to your site (eg, editing titles and meta description) don’t automatically reflect on search engines. What you see at any given moment in SERPs is what’s been cached – check the date of the cache to know how old it is. So, it takes a fresh new crawl for changes to take effect.
It would never be problem until we got error message from bing webmaster tool. It indicates this has been a major problem.
I am referring my site Hotel Management Training Blog. In seo report provided by Bing it shows that : “There are multiple descriptions on the page”
For example see page source of this page:
there is:
<meta name=”description” content=”Taking an order is a very skillful art which reflects efficiency and standard of both waiter and the establishment. Every Food & Beverage Service staff should have good command over order taking skill to ensure that each guest gets proper”>
and also
<meta name=”description” content=”Must follow tips for waiters on Taking Guest Order in Restaurants”>
While publishing the post I used Meta Description: feature and that’s why I want search engine to look on the later meta description. Both Google & Bing is considering first one which is first few lines from the article.
How to prevent multiple meta description and show only that which i put in that meta description box?
The later one is being created by WP SEO, but first one isn’t!
Are you using thesis’s inbuilt SEO manager? It maybe the reason for duplicate descriptions!
You need to disable it!
Having a really similar issue at http://www.bubble-jobs.co.uk.
Everything was working fine until we noticed we had an ‘error’ on the Yoast plugin which needed fixing. We crossed our fingers and pressed ‘fix’ and everything was fine – until we noticed Google was pulling out the same metadescription (the generic one assigned to the blog as a whole) rather than the individual metadescription for each post.
Did anyone find a way to fix this? I don’t necessarily mind Google pulling out a random excerpt of the article but when it’s just using the same metadescription over and over again, it’s really not great 🙁
