JavaScript: Meta Description Updated by JavaScript

Pages that have meta descriptions that are modified by JavaScript.

This means the meta description in the raw HTML is different to the meta description in the rendered HTML.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

Enable JavaScript rendering mode via ‘Config > Spider > Rendering’ and select ‘JavaScript’ to crawl JavaScript websites.

View URLs with this issue in the ‘JavaScript’ tab and ‘Meta Description Updated by JavaScript’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

The ‘HTML Meta Description’ column shows the meta description found in the original HTML before JavaScript.

The ‘Rendered HTML Meta Description’ column shows the page title found in the rendered HTML after JavaScript has been processed.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Crawl JavaScript Websites‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when the meta description in the raw HTML of a webpage is modified by JavaScript, resulting in a different meta description in the rendered HTML.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/

Has the meta description:

<meta name="description" content="We're the best at technical SEO!" />

In the raw HTML, but this is changed to:

<meta name="description" content="We're pretty good at technical SEO!" />

After JavaScript is executed.

How To Fix

While Google is able to render pages and see client-side only content, consider including important content server side in the raw HTML.