Problem with Google SERPS

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Dave,

Yoast for Wordpress is great you just have to set it up properly: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

It is best practice to add a unique title and description to all the pages that you want to show up on a the SERP.

"Also, when the client searches it says in the meta desc - you've viewed this site many times". What is that?"

This is a personalized setting.

In order to see what a new searcher sees, you will need to clear your browsers history, and make sure you are logged off of any Google accounts.

[netviper]

Thanks Bryan,

I do have it configured correctly - I think.  I have a unique title and desc on every one of the pages.  If I go to the homepage, I see it fine.  It is not showing in the serps.

[Bryan_Loconto]

What is showing in the SERP's? Perhaps the title and description are pulling from somewhere else...

[netviper]

Nothing. It is blank.  Just the URL.

[Bryan_Loconto]

It can be many reasons, withut a URL it will be hard to tell.

If the site is new it may take time to index. Also, in your Wordpress general settings make sure the site title and tagline are left blank.

[netviper]

oh, the site is www.hslawyers.com.

[reallygoodstuff]

When you just see the URL and not the title or description, you need to make extra-sure you are not blocking googlebot.  Check robots.txt , check for meta robots tags, check webmaster Tools.

Maybe try the fetch page as googlebot feature in webmaster tools and see what it shows you?

[netviper]

Hey Joe,

The only recent change has been going to Yoast SEO.  I have already checked webmaster tools.  No errors. Fetched fine and Googlebot and I resubmit it.

[reallygoodstuff]

I also had problems when I went to Yoast SEO, but only because the theme was handling title and description in a method that yoast couldn't override -- but since you can see it on the blog, that's not it.

Here's someone with a similar problem - http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/snippet-missing-preview-text-serps-accompanied-severe-rankings-drop-467567.html

It really does sound like the crawl was blocked somehow.

I mean, you can find other people talking about situations where their optimized titles aren't being used  like http://www.seroundtable.com/google-titles-match-12779.html   but, I've seen the serps with no title or desc before and in those cases, it's been robots.txt stuff or other problems crawling the site.

Any possibilities you had an outage? Do you have analytivcs that let you see googlebot's activities (i.e. do you use something besides Google Analytics?

[Bryan_Loconto]

When you do a search in google for: site:hslawyers.com you can see that all the pages have unique descriptions and titles, therefore nothing is being blocked inthe robot.txt or htaccess file. I would guess it's from the home page which has this as a description

Perhaps Google is not displaying it because of the special characters, but I dont think that is the case. Perhaps your home page is pulling data from outside of the Yoast plug in...

Also,

I found a code on your home page:

from my understanding noodp is attemting to pull your description from DMOZ. Read more here: http://www.seoboy.com/what-are-the-meta-tags-noodp-and-noydir-used-for-in-seo/

[netviper]

I looked in webmaster tools and it did look like it quit crawling the site on the 23rd.  it is back crawling though.  I still cant see why that would cause the meta data to quit showing.

[reallygoodstuff]

If it's blocked but there are still links to it, Google will continue to index the URL's

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449

I would think that if it's crawling again, this problem will go away on it's own. My least favorite part of SEO is understanding the problem and waiting for Google to catch up to my understanding  Good luck!

[netviper]

Looks like fixing that Open Graph setting and resubmitting did the trick.  Thanks for all the suggestions.