One of the common issues for Magento e-commerce websites is the wrong meta description shown on Google. In this blog post, we will tell you the causes of this error as well as how to fix it.
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Causes Of The Wrong Meta Description Error
In general, most of the Magento stores face this error since there is the same content appearing on multiple pages.
Another typical reason is that the store owners don’t provide unique meta tags for each page on their site.
However, in some cases, it might not be our fault but Google. Its bots crawl to our site and get random content on the site and show it as the meta description instead of the one that we have already prepared.
Each of the above cause will have a different solution to it. Let’s figure it out on the next part.
How To Fix Wrong Meta Description Error For Magento Websites
If your store has multiple websites, it’s highly recommended to add a tag <link> with certain attributes so as to avoid the problem of duplicate description as the following:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.com/” hreflang=”en-us” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.uk/” hreflang=”en-uk” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />
Moreover, it’s worth noting that the “x-default” value points to the .com version. All users who are not from UK and US will see your .com page.
Otherwise, your website’s meta description for the United Kingdom may be replaced by a meta description for the domain .com.
1. Avoid duplicated meta description
It’s taboo to apply identical or similar descriptions for all/ many pages on your website.
If you still try to do that, Google will consider those pages duplicates and won’t display them on the search results.
In some cases, your pages will even be discarded from the Google index.
Besides, we highly recommend you use marked-up data in the meta description in order to include structured data about the page. For example, in the product page’s meta description, you can mention important information such as its price, materials, manufacturer, and so on.
2. Use SEO extensions to create meta descriptions
If you are too busy creating a unique meta description for every page, using a Magento SEO extension might be an ideal solution. Most plugins will help you automatically generate different meta descriptions based on the available database of the website. Large Magento e-commerce stores have widely used this solution.
3. Re-submit Your Magento Web Page To Google Search Console
If you have already checked your meta description on the Magento backend and found that all related configurations are right but your metadata on the Google search result ranking page is still wrong, the best simple solution is to re-submit your page to Google.
Log in to your Google Search Console, paste your link to ask Google to re-inspect your site, then click the Request Again button. After that, Google bots will crawl again to your site and this time, it might adjust the meta description and make it right.
Sometimes, we have to carry out GSC submission several times to get the expected result.
Wrapping Up
The meta description is important to SEO since many users look into it and decide whether they will visit this or another site. Therefore, if Google shows the meta descriptions that are unmatched by what you wrote on the backend, you have to fix it as soon as possible. There are several ways to do that as we have mentioned.
Besides the meta descriptions, there are more common issues related to SEO in Magento 2 websites that you might consider:
