SEO errors and disappearance of article descriptions in Google after update

Your page has “nofollow” in the robots meta tag.

Unfortunately, this also applies to those publications where “Nofollow” is not used and indexing is allowed. The problem during the test occurs only when using Rank Math.

But thanks anyway for the answer and your help.

Looking at the URL you’ve shared, there is a meta description on the page, which Google should be able to use, even if it can’t understand the page.

Searching for “site:https://tengyart.ru/” shows many pages with descriptions. If you want help with another page, provide the URL of that page, along with a detailed description of what you think is wrong.

This link for “Сэйю Genshin Impact” does not display a description (only the site name and part of the query).

In the search engine it looks something like this.

The previous article I wrote about earlier does not even display the title in the search engine, giving a description instead of a link. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like by query.

Another article, marked in red on the screenshot, also does not show a description on Google, only a link.

This is just a small fraction of examples, in fact, there are many more. Not all of the articles partially lost their descriptions or became incorrectly displayed (in link format without explanatory text, ignoring description), but the only thing that was updated before the bug occurred was Rank Math.

I’m not sure if it makes sense to list all the links, but I hope it will help to somehow localize the problem.

Thanks a lot again for your help!

I can see the meta description “Сэйю Genshin Impact для всех игровых персонажей и NPC в одной подборке! Обзор актёров озвучки в 2021 году, их лучшие роли в аниме, арты и другие подробности” in the page source.

The second article’s page source had the description “Где и как получить части снеговика, чтобы лепить пухленьких снеговичков в игре Genshin Impact? Инструкция”.

Both page also appear in the first post sitemap.

What do you see in Google Search Console? Can Google crawl/index these pages, or does it list any errors?

Can you see any related HTTP errors in your site’s raw access log?

BTW, your robots.txt disallows /wp-admin/, which might be blocking the use of /wp-admin/admin_ajax.php. Consider adding this line:

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Hello @tengyart,

Thank you for contacting the support and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

1. First of all, I am assuming that you have already changed the SEO Meta Title and Meta Description with the help of Rank Math:

Add a Meta Description in Classic Editor: https://i.rankmath.com/dhECkg
Add title and description in Gutenberg: https://i.rankmath.com/ZO21Cd

2. Then, ensure that this is the setting in the Schema tab if the Schema Markup module is enabled on your website:
https://i.rankmath.com/pG0pcS

To reiterate, the Schema title must show %seo_title% and the description should show %seo_description% – this will ensure your SEO title and SEO Description that you set up via Rank Math can also be used for your schema details:

3. The next step is to check if your title/description is properly set up in the page source:
https://i.rankmath.com/HwXR1o

You can use this tool for the same as well: https://www.heymeta.com/

4. If it matches your settings, then you must check if Google has seen the changes already or not.

For that, please check when the Google cache was updated for that page:
a. https://i.rankmath.com/9q6X0H
b. https://i.rankmath.com/R8N0Uh

If the cache date is from before adding the new meta description, then you just have to wait for Google to re-crawl and re-index the page with the new info. If the date is after you made the changes, then you just have to wait it out and there is no further input needed from your end.

Do note that if everything’s fine and Google still decides to show a different meta title/description for your search keyword, there is nothing you can do as Google sometimes ignores the custom meta info altogether and show something from the page’s content that matches the search intent better.

Here are some of the common reasons Google might not use the meta description you provided:
– The meta description is not relevant or useful (ie, just a collection of keywords).
– The exact same meta description is provided across a large number of pages.
– The meta description doesn’t match what the user is searching for, but other content on the page does.

There is a whole article dedicated to this on SearchEngineJournal:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-offers-suggestions-for-avoiding-meta-description-rewrites/359884/

Here is an example showing Google changes title depending on the keyword used:
https://i.rankmath.com/oT6VQe
&
https://i.rankmath.com/Mrhb0x

The best you can do is optimize your meta tags to try and match the intent of the search/keyword.

Hope that helps. If you have any further question(s), please let us know.