Could my Crawl Error Report be wrong?

[skehoe]

HI there,

I am using Yoast SEO plugin on a wordpress website.  I am currently showing 70 Med priority crawl errors 'missing meta description' on my Moz pro account.

This number of missing meta descriptions has increased over the last 6 weeks. But every single page / post / tag / category has both the title and meta description completed via Yoast.

I requested a google bot to crawl the site a few weeks ago as thought it perhaps wasn't been crawled and updated.

Any idea what the issue might be?  Could the Moz report be incorrect for some reason?  Or could something be blocking Moz / Google from seeing the Yoast plugin?

[LauraSultan]

I can't speak to the validity of the Moz report in your case, but you might want to try a different crawler like Screaming Frog and compare what you are seeing from Moz.

[JordanLowry]

I have found Moz to be quite accurate I agree with Laura use Screaming frog to run a crawl as well and compare and contrast the missing meta descriptions and other errors you may find between the two crawlers. Or another solution would be to go to the URL's in question with missing meta descriptions and view the source code and look for the tags in and see if they in fact are missing.

I cant speak on the accuracy of yoast but I have not had any problems with the Moz crawler in the past.

[Brando16]

Do you have any urls with query strings? I ran into this a few weeks ago. The report will see each url with a query string as unique and flag each one as missing a meta description if the main url does not have a meta description.

For me, it was just a registration form that had data pre-populated by the query string. I added a meta description to the registration form page, which was also pointed to as the canonical,  and 65 errors were fixed.

[MattRoney]

Hi Stacey! Are you by any chance able to share a few of the URLs with the error so we can take a look?

[skehoe]

Hi Matt,

Yes of course, the following a showing 'missing meta description' on the report.

http://panatlanticinc.com/services/

http://panatlanticinc.com/industries/

http://panatlanticinc.com/who-are-we/

[Brando16]

You do have an empty meta description tag in the header of each page:

But it is followed by a meta description tag with content. Perhaps the crawler is getting caught up on the first one and reporting that?