Missing Meta Description tags?

[notebooks]

I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up. 
Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here?

http://notebooks.com

[Tom-Anthony]

Unsure why SEOmoz tools are missing it, I can see you are using All in One SEO pack and you do have meta descriptions. You actually have 2!!!

The head area of your pages has all sorts going on with javascript and many link tags. If possible you should try to clean it up a bit, I'd suggest. Then obviously ensure you have only one meta description.

Hopefully when a moz staffer sees this thread they'll take a look into your bug.

[jcolman]

Unforutnately, your elements are hidden inside comment tags.  Here's what I'm seeing on the page when I perform a "View Source":

The comment tags are "".  They're usually used to hide content from rendering on the client-side.  Learn more about HTML comment tags here: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/misc/comment.html

Not sure why you'd contain these valid elements within comment tags, but that's why SEOmoz can't see them. I'd suggest that this is also not best practice for Google and other search engines, even if they've managed to extract them.

So: remove the two comment tags from your elements and you'll be back in the clear.  Cheers!

[notebooks]

Thanks. Yes, I commented out the first, which is auto-generated by our Theme/WP.

[notebooks]

Thank you. We actually commented that out to try and direct the search engines to the All-in-One SEO meta tags, which occur further down the page. Google seems to be picking up the meta descriptions ok - we can see tem on SERPs just fine. Guess it's just when SEOMoz is crawling?

Thanks,

Xavier

[AaronWheeler]

Hey Xavier!

This was the reason we weren't seeing it, but as you can see, Google's crawler is a clever little thing. It can pick up a lot of cool stuff that Roger can't. Fortunately, this is exactly the type of error we want Roger to show you, so we probably wouldn't change it so Roger could figure out these things anyways. It's great that Google figured it out, but it would have been understandable if they hadn't been able to.

Hope this helps!

[AaronWheeler]

However, I will ask you just to clarify - which meta description is getting picked up? The one further down the page? If that's the one getting indexed, then it's something else probably... shoot me an email at help@seomoz.org and I can dig into it further to see if it's a bug on our side. Thanks!