Excerpt not being shortened

  • Resolved zimbo000

    (@zimbo000)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    I have a function in functions.php to shorten the excerpt on posts to 20 words. You can see on the page referenced that all excerpts are 20 words.

    In posts, the Meta Description is set to “Excerpt…”. In the top post’s SERPS summary (see image below), “Council to invest ￡55K…”, Yoast is incorrectly showing a Meta Description of 25 words. However, said 25 words is actually 141 characters with spaces but the Meta Description ‘bar’ is amber (not green) and the SEO Analysis says the Meta Description is over 156 characters, which it is not. Why is the analysis not matching the excerpt?

    https://imgur.com/a/K8ZOAKO

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @zimbo000

    Thanks for reaching out about your meta description length. Here’s the meta description currently in the page source:

    At the Full Council meeting this week Town Councillors approved to spend up to ￡55K on new Christmas lighting for the town. Although the final…

    This is 25 words/145 characters, and the bar shows green in the screenshot you shared. Can you share another screenshot of the SEO analysis reporting 156 characters?

    Thread Starter zimbo000

    (@zimbo000)

    Hi,

    The SEO Title is green but the Meta Description in that first image is amber.

    Here is the full analysis: https://imgur.com/gallery/RJU4c6S

    You can see it’s the post in question via the slug at the top, and at the bottom it states “Meta description length: The meta description is over 156 characters.”

    So there are 2 issues there, but the other problem is that, as I stated above, I have a function in functions.php to shorten the excerpt on posts to 20 words but Yoast is selecting 25. You can see the excerpts are reduced to 20 words on the /council-news post summary page I referenced.

    Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Right. It’s amber, not green. I suspect the issue has to do with the function you are using to trim the excerpt. It’s likely Yoast SEO fetches the full excerpt and ignores the trimming. Unfortunately, troubleshooting your custom function that trims the excerpt and how it interacts with the Yoast SEO content analysis is outside the scope of support we offer here.

    If you use the full excerpt as it’s designed in WordPress, but Yoast SEO gives a wrong analysis, we can troubleshoot that.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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