Description not taken into account

Thank you!

I see nothing technically wrong with the output of TSF on your site. The output should have stayed the same between updates if you wrote custom descriptions, too.

Still, I do notice Google is ignoring the homepage description of the site you linked. It accepts descriptions from other pages I inspected (you can test by searching for site:example.com; it filters out most context-tweaks Google applies).

Please see this page to learn what Google expects from a description and how they assert them from the page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet.

I quote from that page:

Google will sometimes use the <meta name="description"> tag from a page to generate a snippet in search results, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content.

It means that Google is inclined to ignore descriptions that do not meet their requirements and might take snippets from the page’s content if they believe it better fits the search query.

Note that Google had a spat with France’s legislation a while back, instigating copyright directives for robots. I recommend enabling those under “SEO > Robots Meta Settings > General > Copyright Directive Settings” and using the defaults: “Unlimited, Large or full size, and Full video preview.” This will make Google more eager to take content from your pages, including that of the description meta tag and structured data.

Thank you for that answer. However, I have the correct settings as in your message. The two sites that have this problem are the ones that I updated from 5.0.0 to 0.2 All my other sites have no problem without updating. Previously the 2 problematic sites had the correct description. I deactivated the plugin and reactivated it, cleared all caches… Thanks again for your quick response.

Hello!

From TSF v5.0.0 to v5.0.2, I haven’t changed how descriptions are handled. And I haven’t changed how page meta descriptions are handled in many years. I cannot find any technical issue with TSF on the site you’ve linked me to.

Google constantly makes minor adjustments to its search engine, and one change that affected your site’s performance may have coincided with our recent updates.

Also, please note that Google takes a few days (sometimes weeks) to process changes to your site. So, the changes you’ve seen at Google Search may stem from updating all the way from v4.2.8. On that note, in v5.0.0, I added more extensive Schema.org output to help search engines learn more about your pages. This extra information may be used for description generation, as per their documentation (they call it “Rich Results”).

I’m afraid I do not have any more information about this issue; I do not work for Google, so I cannot look closely into their methods. I am happy you’ve considered my recommendations, which may positively affect how Google deals with your website.

Ultimately, what matters most is that your website is not losing traffic due to updates — not necessarily how Google chooses to present it. It is my job to see you increase quality traffic, and I hope that, regardless of the changes you see on Google, the lines at Google Search Console’s indexing performance trend upward.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Sybre Waaijer. Reason: more info

Good morning, Thank you once again for your response. I know very well that we are not Google. In any case for your plugin and the support you give us. It proves the quality of the latter and your values. Kind regards