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1. BStock1983
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hi,

   I'm almost done building my site and no matter what I do I cannot get my meta description to appear correctly in Google search results. I have set the privacy to allow search engines, I've put <meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" /> into my header as well as the wp head hook. I've tried All In One SEO and now Headspace2 (which has helped set up the title tags), but the meta description never seems to change. I've given every solution at least a few hours to give the site time to get crawled. Has anyone else had an issue with this?

2. Micah Cooksey
   Moderator
   Posted 2 years ago #

   First off, it can take up to a couple of months for Google to re-crawl your site. Some people say that setting the crawl frequency to "hourly" actually makes Google crawl it every hour. But, Google only uses those parameters to rate the pages on your site in comparison to each other. So that's the hardest part of SEO: patience. It's hard for me, too :)

   Sometimes what will happen is a user searches for "purple hats", and that phrase is not contained in your description. So, it pulls an excerpt from your content that does include that phrase. So making sure the description contains your primary keyword phrases can help. Also, if you use an SEO plugin like All in One SEO, you don't have to put anything in your theme. You don't want the same thing three times in your template.

   Let me know if that helps.

3. BStock1983
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Oh ok, I knew that it took some time for them to crawl my site, but with static sites I've built my meta tag descriptions have gotten picked up right away, so I figured it'd be the same. Thanks for letting me know. I've got HeadSpace2 installed right now, so I'll just let that work it's magic. Are you sure that even for static pages the descriptions won't get picked up? I'm just surprised that Powered by WordPress is what's showing up for the homepage.

4. Micah Cooksey
   Moderator
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Yeah, sometimes they get crawled within a day or so like you said, but sometimes it takes longer. Does the description show in the source for the page?

5. s_ha_dum (was apljdi)
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Don't expect Google to use your meta description exactly as you wrote it.

6. BStock1983
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Yea, this stuff makes sense. But, I don't get why even after days nothing from the page, be it meta content or content from the page itself is not taken for the description and it just says "Just Another WordPress Weblog".

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