Meta Tag Descriptions not being found in Moz Crawls

[MOZ.info]

Hey guys,

I have been managing a few websites and have input them into Moz for crawl reports, etc.

For a while I have noticed that we were getting a gratuitous amount of errors when it came to the number of missing meta tags.  It was numbering in the 200's.  The sites were in place before I got here and a lot of the older posts no one had even attempted to include tags, links of the page or anything.

As they are all Wordpress Sites and they all already had the Yoast/Wordpress SEO plug-in installed on them, I decided I would go through each post and media file one at a time and update their meta tags via the plug in.  I personally did this so I know that I added and saved each one, however the Moz crawl reports continue to show that we are missing roughly 200 meta tags.  I've seen a huge drop off in 404 errors and stuff since I went through and double checked everything on the sites, however the meta tag errors persist.

Is this the case that Moz is not recognizing the tags when it crawls because I used the Yoast Plugin?  Or would you say that the plugin is the issue and I should find another way to add meta tags to the pages and posts on the site?  My main concern is that if Moz is having issues crawling the sites, is Google also seeing the same thing?

The URLS include:
sundancevacationsblog.com
sundancevacationsnews.com
sundancevacationscharities.com

Any help would be appreciated!

[Keszi]

Hi Jackie,

What I'd advise you to do, is to create a Screaming Frog Crawl so you can compare the two crawl data. If both show missing meta descriptions on the same pages, then there might be something on your side.

It is always good to double-check the information you are provided. So you are sure that the issue isn't a bug.

Gr., Keszi

P.S. I made a quick crawl with Screaming Frog on the first domain: sundancevacationsblog.com and found quite a big number of Missing Meta Titles.

[Linda-Vassily]

Looking at the first one with Screaming Frog, there are 112 pages without descriptions.

Visually checking an example of those, http://sundancevacationsnews.com/, I see in the description, an empty description.

Checking one with a description: https://sundancevacationsblog.com/sundance-vacations-travel-advice/international/, I see

It just looks like some of them didn’t have descriptions added. Check back in Yoast again and look at the pages that Moz says have no description. Does anything look different in those than in the ones that do have descriptions?

I don't think the problem is the plug-in since both the pages with and without the descriptions are using it, and yes, Google will see the same thing.

[MOZ.info]

You are correct, after doing some more looking around I have found the same things.  Some of the pages have meta descriptions and some don't.  It seems that Yoast is doing it's job, however I added a different plugin to help add some additional tags.  That has also seemed to help, but again has not totally fixed the issue.

Clearly I am going to have to delve deeper into this as I have already taken a day up looking at it.  I will edit a few more things and then re-crawl and see what I come up with. I'll post the results here as well.

[MOZ.info]

I have implemented a few changes on the site, including that of adding another plugin to add meta tags.  As it appears, for some reason the Yoast plugin was adding a meta description for articles and posts, however it never included authors or page descriptions.  Weird.

The page was re-crawled today and all of the Meta Tag errors are gone! Hooray!  Now I just need to work on the super long titles that the writers before me used.

Thanks for the help to all the took the time to post!

[Linda-Vassily]

Great that you have it fixed! (Did you look in the Yoast settings to see if different post types have different settings? That could be part of your original problem...)

[Keszi]

Glad to hear it got resolved so quickly! Keep up the good job!