Meta description
Table of Contents
Meta description
The meta description tab includes data related to meta descriptions of internal URLs in the crawl. The filters show common issues discovered for meta descriptions.
The meta description is an HTML attribute in the head of a webpage that provides a summary of the page to users. The words in a description are not used in ranking by Google, but they can be shown in the search results to users, and therefore heavily influence click through rates.
The meta description should be placed in the head of the document and looks like this in HTML:
<meta name="description" content="This is a meta description."/>
Columns
This tab includes the following columns.
- Address – The URL crawled.
- Occurrences – The number of meta descriptions found on the page (the maximum we find is 2).
- Meta Description 1/2 – The meta description.
- Meta Description 1/2 length – The character length of the meta description.
- Indexability – Whether the URL is indexable or Non-Indexable.
- Indexability Status – The reason why a URL is Non-Indexable. For example, if the URL is canonicalised to another URL.
Filters
This tab includes the following filters.
- Missing – Any pages which have a missing meta description, the content is empty or has a whitespace. This is a missed opportunity to communicate the benefits of your product or service and influence click through rates for important URLs.
- Duplicate – Any pages which have duplicate meta descriptions. It’s really important to have distinct and unique meta descriptions that communicate the benefits and purpose of each page. If they are duplicate or irrelevant, then they will be ignored by search engines.
- Over 155 characters – Any pages which have meta descriptions over 155 characters in length. Characters over this limit might be truncated in Google’s search results.
- Below 70 characters – Any pages which have meta descriptions below 70 characters in length. This isn’t strictly an issue, but an opportunity. There is additional room to communicate benefits, USPs or call to actions.
- Over X Pixels – Google snippet length is actually based upon pixels limits, rather than a character length. The SEO Spider tries to match the latest pixel truncation points in the SERPs, but it is an approximation and Google adjusts them frequently. This filter shows any pages which have descriptions over X pixels in length and might be truncated in Google’s search results.
- Below X Pixels – Any pages which have meta descriptions under X pixels in length. This isn’t strictly an issue, but an opportunity. There is additional room to communicate benefits, USPs or call to actions.
- Multiple – Any pages which have multiple meta descriptions. There should only be a single meta description for a page. Multiple meta descriptions are often caused by multiple conflicting plugins or modules in CMS.
- Outside <head> – Pages with a meta description that is outside of the head element in the HTML. The meta description should be within the head element, or search engines may ignore it.
Please see our Learn SEO guide on writing Meta Descriptions.
