Quick Edit Meta Description bugginess

Hi @robaxxx,

I’m afraid I’m not able to replicate what you stated when tested. I tested by creating a new Elementor page without adding any metas. Used the “Quick Edit” feature in the WP dashboard for the respective Elementor page under Pages > All pages.

Then updated the Quick Edit by keeping the metas blank but was not able to notice any issue.

Are the mentioned steps followed correctly? Please advise if I’m missing out on anything.

Also, could we know whether you are testing using the latest version of SmartCrawl, i.e. v 3.2.1?

We had some fixes regarding similar on version 3.2.1, so making sure whether it’s tested with the latest version.

If you are noticing the issue with the latest version, then possible to also share a page URL where you could replicate the issue so that we could have a better idea too?

Looking forward to your response.

Kind Regards,
Nithin

Hi Nithin

I’ve spent the day setting up a copy of my multisite system to test this. Everything is up to date including SmartCrawl 3.2.1

I checked a site that has around 30 pages.

Without SmartCrawl activated, the pages have no meta description tag. When I activate SmartCrawl, the pages gain a meta description as well as OG and Twitter tags.

When I check each page in the admin, I find 3 pages that have the Elementor style statement inserted and it shows up in all of these tags in the page source.

That means it was not the action of going into Quick Edit that did it, as I had thought. It is simply what the plugin does by default when activated. It must go looking for the content to insert and for some reason it finds the CSS?

It’s not clear why it picks on certain pages. One has a Forminator form, another has just text and images, and the last has a Tables plugin by JoomUnited on it.

Here’s the page that just has text and images (can you delete this from the post?): https://template.wumpworld.com/our-responsibility/tcfd/
Check the source there and you’ll see it.

I can send you access to this WP instance if you’d like to look in? You can mess it up all you want.
Regards
Rob

Hi @robaxxx

Thanks for response!

I did some testing on my end and while I couldn’t replicate this either, I’d like to give it another shot.

Could you please save that example page (the one that you linked to) as a template in Elementor and then export it from template library? You’ll get .json file so please put it on your Google Drive, Dropbox or similar account and share direct link to it with us in response.

Make sure that this link is publicly accessible and we’ll then be able to import the page and do more testing.

Best regards,
Adam

Hi Adam

I’ve exported all 3 of the pages I found with the issue and put them in a zip on Google Drive.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EmCFl8Ft7ZTcdy9sn4XOlWiBT3ZivluO/view?usp=sharing

The specific page linked in my previous post is elementor-3280-2022-10-11.json

And the WP instance I spent time setting up for this is available at any time if you want to get in. Just let me know where to send the details.
Regards
Rob

Hi @robaxxx

THanks for sharing those!

I just tested this inside out any way I could but still couldn’t replicate the issue and couldn’t find any possible reason for this.

I’d like to ask you to check two more things then:

1. Please check ID of such example affected page. I think for the one you shared earlier it would be 1601. Then if possible enter database via phpMyAdmin and in “wp_postmeta” table search for records for “post_id” of that ID.

See if there’s a “_wds_trimmed_excerpt” meta_key value or is it empty.

2. Try disabling all the plugins (except Elementor and SmartCrawl) and switching theme to Twenty Twenty-Two and then replicating the issue – is it happening then or not?

Kind regards,
Adam

Hi Adam

I get the impression that SmartCrawl applies the meta descriptions on first activation and that’s how it remains until manually changed. At least that would explain the outcome of the tests below, but I don’t know.

The two screenshots linked here show the db rows for the affected post 1601 and an unaffected post for comparison. I can’t see any keys with that name in either case. I also checked around for any SmartCrawl tables at site and network level and could only see one called _wp_smartcrawl_redirects. Not sure if that means anything.

https://ibb.co/jkXnc41
https://ibb.co/XJqMbR4

Carried out these steps and tests:

Deactivated at site level:
Astra Pro
Disable Author Archives
Favicon by RealFaviconGenerator
Forminator
GuardGiant Brute Force Protection
Pre-Publish Checklist
Premium Starter Templates
Spectra
Ultimate Addons for Elementor
WP File Download
WP Media folder
WP Table Manager
WP Team Showcase and Slider Pro
WPS Hide Login

Checked page Source – No change

Deactivated at networklevel:
Activity Log
Admin Menu Editor Pro
AME Branding Add-on
Autoremove Attachments
Better Search Replace
Branda
Code Snippets Pro
Imsanity
Mail logging – WP Mail Catcher
Multisite Enhancements
NS Cloner – Site Copier
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
User Role Editor Pro
WordPress Toolbar Editor
WP-DBManager
Yoast Duplicate Post

Checked page Source – No change

Deactivated and Reactivated SmartCrawl
Same outcome

Changed theme from Astra to Twenty Twenty-Two
Same outcome

Deactivated and Reactivated SmartCrawl
Same outcome

Deactivated Elementor Pro
Same outcome

Deactivated Elementor
Same outcome

Deactivated and Reactivated SmartCrawl
Same outcome

At this point no plugins other than SmartCrawl are enabled. The meta description for the post still holds the elementor css and that makes it look to me like it was picked up on first activation and stored somewhere.

I’ve left the site as-is at this point – Page is here:
https://template.wumpworld.com/our-responsibility/tcfd/

Regards
Rob

Hi @robaxxx

I made some extra tests but seems something is happening on that shared page:

I can see Elementor CSS is being added to the page body, so I created an Elementor page and then disabled it and I can confirm the CSS is gone when I disable it, it doesn’t render on the page.

Can you run this test?

Enable Elementor & SmartCrawl with the default WordPress theme, then create a new page and see if you can replicate the issue.

Let us the result you got.
Best Regards
Patrick Freitas

This is clearly going around in circles now and so I’m putting a stop to it. I can’t keep spending time on overlapping instructions from multiple different people. It’s not productive.

In my opinion, this issue occurs with existing pages after SmartCrawl has been added to the site. I found the issue in 10% of pages. I don’t think any amount of me creating new pages with Smartcrawl installed is going to replicate this.

Regardless, the tests I’ve completed today are as follows:

First I created 10 new pages with SmartCrawl but without Elementor installed. No issue on those 10 pages.

Then I activated Elementor and checked the pages again. No issue again so I deleted those pages.

Then I deleted the SmartCrawl plugin after first resetting all sites and setting it to remove all related data.

Then I added 10 new Elementor pages, installed SmartCrawl and activated it. I checked those 10 pages and did not find the issue.

However, I did find the issue again on the same 3 pages it happened on previously. Those are the pages in the zip in this ticket. I can’t see any particular thing in common in those 3 pages, but I’m not a WP developer.

Result:

No, I cannot replicate the issue in those specific tests. But I can replicate the issue by simply installing the plugin and checking all of the existing pages. i.e. it repeated itself.

That’s the bug I reposted, and it remains even though I cannot replicate it with a few new pages.

I’ve deleted the test instance because I’ve offered it more than once in the thread but no one wants to check it out.

I’ll leave it there.
Thanks

Hi @robaxxx

I’ve deleted the test instance because I’ve offered it more than once in the thread but no one wants to check it out.

I’m sorry if we gave you impression like we didn’t want to help but it’s not the case. The point is that it’s not allowed here to ask for or offer access to sites (even such staging/test ones):

https://www.ads-software.com/support/guidelines/#the-bad-stuff

Getting back to the issue itself: I understand that this may not seem productive and helpful but we are all trying to help here. The key is to be able to replicate this because this is necessary to identify why it happens and what causes it. Even being able to access the test site that you had – that wouldn’t help if it’s not possible to replicate it there. I mean – we do know and understand “what” is the issue but what we are trying to find out is “why” and “how” it happened as this is the only way to find a fix for it.

I just spend considerable amount of time on two different tests sites of mine, trying to replicate this again – with different versions of Elementor and SmartCrawl, activating SmartCrawl before and after creating the page, using different settings/configurations of both Elementor and SmartCrawl, using different themes… and a number of other things I could think of that we didn’t quite discuss here.

I’m afraid it’s still nothing – I wasn’t able to trigger such behavior/issue in any way (and, as far as I understand, you weren’t able too actually).

I would love and be more than happy if we could solve that but at this point, it looks to me like it was most unfortunate issue but more of a “temporary glitch” or thing specific to some very specific combination of versions of plugin and theme on site along with configuration at the time; I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of asset optimization and/or caching was also involved in it at some point after all.

That being said, I sincerely apologize for taking all that time and not really solving it and I’m deeply grateful for all your cooperation. Yet, I’m afraid we cannot find any way to replicate this under any circumstances that we tried.

We will keep a very close eye on all the cases that may even remotely be similar to this and our QA Team will put extra effort to test upcoming updates with Elementor – additionally to all regular testing so we could make sure that this doesn’t happen again (and if we “catch” such behavior finally – that it will be fixed right away).

Kind regards
Adam

Hi Adam

I’m only new to WP this past year, moving over from DNN, and when I report bugs, I’m used to developers wanting to get in and see what’s happening.

I was unaware of that WP support rule and I’m surprised this is the first time anyone has pointed it out given that I’ve set up and offered access to staged copies of the affected system many times over within the same tickets. E.g. I reported a Forminator bug where I was made to create an entire new server environment from scratch to confirm the issue, which it did, but then no one wanted to look at it.

This idea that people reporting bugs have to get you to replicate it on your system is not very useful when it more than likely is going to work on yours anyway… because your system is probably not identical in every way. Frankly i’s a bit of a cop-out because one can easily state there is no bug.. because “it isn’t happening here’. Obviously one has to balance your time spent versus time spent by bug reporters, but this 100% hands-off rule for every report is not that great.

Regarding this issue I reported here. I was unable to get you to replicate it there, but it still happened here. If I were on your end, and I thought this might be a real bug or conflict, then I would have asked me to put a ticket in at my/your website and then not worry about the WP Support rule. One could have figured this out more quickly and easily.

I also didn’t enjoy having to put links to my site and to shared files in the public ticket here. The instant I posted the link to the staged copy, it started getting comment bombed. There should be a way to send such things privately in some cases.

Maybe provide a support ticket from your site in certain cases and then check the faulty site (or a copy thereof) directly.

So that’s my feedback on that matter.

And to wrap up the particular issue in this ticket:

I reverted to a backup 15 days prior to installing both SmartCrawl and Hummingbird, the latter of which had started causing the DB to grow in an unsustainable manner and attempts to disable it started breaking things all over. IT started to get real messy and the only safe way out was to go back. I started a thread about the separately.

Then I changed all the sites back to WP Meta SEO which I was using previously for the same purpose – but had removed in favour of Smartcrawl. I examined the pages and found that a handful of them also had the Elementor style in the page and so I submitted the bug report to that developer. Within two hours, he had logged in, found the cause, fixed it and got back to me.

I asked about the details and he explained that when no meta description is entered, the plugin will take some text from the post_content field for it. Elementor may sometimes enter a style tag in there and it might pick that up. So he added code to detect this and skip it.

I don’t know if Smartcrawl gets the description from that field when it’s not manually updated, but if it does then it will have the same problem. Conversely, if it already detects and removes/skips such tags in the field then that would have been known.

So that’s the issue and that’s the fix.

Regards
Rob

Hi @robaxxx

Now that you mentioned WP Meta SEO plugin, I was actually able to replicate it right away with this plugin. It does happen but it’s not related to how Elementor handles this but to that specific plugin.

The side-effect would be that if that automatically generated excerpt gets for any reason saved with post data – then yes, SmartCrawl later on would pick it up.

However, SmartCrawl does not and will not automatically pick such code this way because it indeed does look into page content and “auto-generates” excerpt form content to be used as meta description tag (if it’s configured to do so) but it sanitizes it and strips all tags from it.

Having said that, I’m really sorry that we couldn’t help you with this and once again, I apologize for the trouble. I’m glad to know though that you have that solved and as for SmartCrawl – as I mentioned above, when it auto-generates excerpt it cleans-up the code from it.

Kind regards,
Adam

Just following up again just for anyone’s interest.

The WP Meta SEO guy has been staying on this issue and found it was only occurring on pages created by Elementor 3.6.5 (possibly older as well, but it was that version on my system)

When those pages are opened and resaved in a later Elementor (3.8 for me), the style statements are gone and neither his plugin nor yours shows it.
Rob

Hi @robaxxx,

Thanks for the update, we appreciate!

Kind regards,
Zafer