Metadescription not being pulled by Google? Yoast v SmartCrawl?

[laurendavidson]

Hey guys,

For whatever reason, Google isn't pulling the metadescriptions I've provided for a wordpress site I'm working on. We had both Yoast and SmartCrawl installed, so I thought maybe they were confusing Google and deactivated Yoast. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the issue. Instead of using the text I've plugged into SmartCrawl, Google is just using snippets from the blog posts... And it's happening for every single post, leading to a huge uptick in metadata issues in moz. Any idea how to fix this??

Thank you!

[Xiano]

Google makes the decision, and it can actually be pretty hard to convince them to use your description rather than a snippet on the page.

Google says "Google will sometimes use the description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content." (Bold is mine) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

Their page above is a pretty good starting point to guide you on how to write good descriptions.

[jacobmartinnn]

Google will sometimes use the description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content." (Bold is mine) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en