Items 1 to 9 of 22484 total in our Meta Description

[Benj25]

Our homepage on our ecommerce site has a category as part of the front page. Unfortunately the top of the category says:

Items 1 to 9 of 22484 total

Is there a way through GWMT or any other method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?

Or is the only solution to remove it from the page all together?

[RobertFisher]

Hello Benj25

When you say the Meta on your home page, and I am assuming the book site, I don't see it with that category and when I do a search on Google I do not see that in the snippet. (I checked US and .co.uk).

Can you tell us/show us where you are seeing it?

Thanks,

[stukerr]

Hi Ben,

The only experience i've had with this is actually trying to get google to show this little snippet, what I found was that they seemed to just pick this up from the page, when the page had text similar to 'item 1 of x' or 'product 1 of x' - item / product seemed to be the words that google were looking for - only a guess but maybe try something like 'Book 1 - 10 of 22484' on the page and see what google makes of that?

All the best,

Stuart

[RobertFisher]

Benj25

In trying to see what you were using as a platform I went to Builtwith. In using their plugin, I could only see that you were on Apache, using HTML 4.01, and canonicals. (normally see a lot more)

On the Builtwith site, you come up with them saying you don't have a meta description, H1, etc. When I look at it, these are there so they are in some way not being picked up. (Remember, it is rare for Google to choose a meta description when there is one there.) So, the reason this items 1 to 9 ... is coming up is Google is not seeing the meta either.

Without knowing the particulars of the site, it is a bit more difficult to determine the cause. If you want to see what I am seeing, go to http://builtwith.com and put your site in. You will then get the initial info. Then, at the top, the 4th tab will be yoursite.com SEO profile. Click that and start scrolling and reading.

Hope that further clarifies,

Robert

[Benj25]

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback and links.

A bit more info. We're using the open source ecommerce platform Magento.

This is on Google.com.au on our http://www.worldofbooks.com.au site, if you search for World of Books Australia on google.com.au you can see it there at the start.

Our meta description is definitely set on the home page.

Thanks

[stukerr]

Hey,

I checked out your site in the UK serps and could see the Google product count snippet, which is different from the meta description (which also seems to be ok).

I'm no expert with Magento but as I mentioned you may be able to hack the Magento code a little bit to say 'Book 1 - 20 of xxxxxx' instead of 'Item 1 - 20 of xxxxxx' which might stop whatever text matching algorithm Google is using -  i'd probably search the Magento forums for ways to do this - although it's not guaranteed to work i'd say it's worth a shot.

I'm not aware of any meta tag or anything else which would tell Google not to display this snippet i'm afraid (although I may be wrong).

Best,

Stuart

[Benj25]

Hi Stuart,

Yeah I've seen google index it before on Amazon and it says Item, so it might be worth a go. I'll schedule our designer to update this.

I'll report back once it's updated and we've been crawled in case someone else has a similar issue.

Thanks

[stukerr]

Yeah we managed to get it to pick up the products for us, normally seemed to take a day or so after the crawl to reflect the change in the serps, although that was going from not showing it to showing it so not sure about the other way around.

But yeah 'items' and 'products' seem to be the words which trigger it, although there may be more...

Best,

Stuart