Another question from me, possibly related to the initial question.
My hand-crafted SEO meta descriptions do not appear to be showing up properly in Google search results.
For example, do a Google search for “supernormal stimuli” comic. My webpage should be the #1 result.
Instead of my hand-crafted meta-description:
“A reptile brain sits deep within us. How much of our behaviour comes from primal instinct? 20 page comic on supernormal stimuli.”
…Google is displaying the following text:
“Certainly we have enough spare time,. Velociraptor raptor dinosaur skull brain human silhouette drawing cartoon. Supernormal stimuli work on …”
…which is random text from the TITLE tags of the images on that page.
(interestingly there is a mirror copy of my website from my staging server listed in the Google search results…the meta description for that page is showing up perfectly as intended).
It is interesting that the SEO title is showing up exactly how I specify, but not the description.
Can anyone suggest why Google would be ignoring the meta descriptions which I am entering via Yoast SEO plugin?
An update to my second post in this thread:
I believe my problems may have been caused by not having
<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>
in my header.php file. Will wait until Google re-indexes me and see if my hand-written SEO descriptions appear.
…
…I will also wait and see if this fixes my initial question about Facebook snippets choosing random text. Will report back.
I’d like to know if you fixed your FB problem, Im having the same thing. It’s coming up OK in google, but when my site is posted to FB the wrong thumbnail shows up as well asa bunch of meta thats not even in my settings. See pic:http://www.thefrugalette.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fbshare2.png
thefrugalette, it doesn’t seem as though my Facebook problem has been fixed. Right now it is still just grabbing random text from within the page.
The default thumbnail image that Facebook chooses seems to be whichever image has the smallest file size. In my opinion, it should be choosing the image which is closest to the top of the page.
Can a WordPress SEO by Yoast developer comment on this thread? Should the plugin be helping Facebook display the description, or is this not a supported feature?
Hi- did someone find a solution to this yet?
I have the same problem where meta description and OG: meta description are not dynamic.
After implementing this SEO plug-in on http://www.thewhiztimes.com ,
I have made changes within the Yoast dashboard- and now every post should generate a unique title and description. I have gone to individual posts and rewritten excerpts too.
This plug in is able to generate different titles (based on what it actually is) but the description is the same for all posts (like what I specified on the home page)
So both on the site and on Facebook/other shares- it is not able to generate a description (based on excerpt) – anyone found any solutions yet?
Stuart: you need to enable the Facebook integration…
In the case of thewhiztimes.com, there’s another description in the source, probably put out by your theme, before my plugins.
Hi Joost,
I think I just enabled Facebook integration via the ‘Social’ page of your plugin.
However, Facebook still doesn’t seem to be behaving properly. e.g. when I submit this webpage as a link to Facebook, the following text appears as the description:
Great to be with you on your new site. Exciting to see the evolution of your work over the past 20 years – can you believe that! As thought provoking and informative as ever. We await the next. Warm wishes.
…which are random text from the ‘comments’ section of that page. That is despite the following being in the <head> section of my source code:
<meta property='og:description' content='A reptile brain sits deep within us. How much of our behaviour comes from primal instinct? 20 page comic on supernormal stimuli.'/>
If you look at my source code, you can also see the meta-description in the <head> section:
<meta name="description" content="A reptile brain sits deep within us. How much of our behaviour comes from primal instinct? 20 page comic on supernormal stimuli."/>
However, Google still seems to be ignoring this. Their description is still just random text from the page:
Read more about the supernormal stimuli concept in the blog section of … Paul & Deb McMillen says: 27 Apr, 2012 … Excellent work, Stuart.
Joost, can you suggest a reason for these two errors?
This script tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.digitaldeliveryapp.com/javascripts/cart.min.js">
isn’t being closed properly, hence the FB issue.
Please read the FAQ re Google description.
Well spotted Joost!
I have let the developer of the other app know to add a </script> tag to his code.
Now both my Google search results and Facebook descriptions are working properly. (Except for the Supernormal Stimuli post, which is mysteriously not displaying properly in Facebook…but I can live with that, as every single other page/post seems to work properly. Perhaps this a legacy issue to do with the old description being cached in FB?)
Hi, FB is still not using the proper thumbnail, I updated the setting with the image I want..several times, and it doesn’t pick it up, it keeps picking up an image from my sidebar.
I have a blog button in my sidebar too, the same image I want brought up and it doesn’t pick it up. I’m getting a bit frustrated, not sure who can check out why the wrong thumbnail keeps attaching, thank you.
http://www.thefrugalette.com
We too are having problems with Facebook showing this as a description when sharing the site url.
“You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=”” title=””> <abbr title=””> <acronym title=””> <b> <blockquote cite=””> <cite> <code> <del datetime=””> <em> <i> <q cite=””> <strike> <strong>”
I have set the description but it has not corrected.
