Metadata Issues
Frequently Asked Questions
What's Covered?
This guide provides more information about the issue types flagged in the Metadata Issues section of Site Crawl.
Quick Links
Overview of Moz Pro Site Crawl Metadata Issues
The issues flagged under Metadata Issues concern meta information, such as page titles and descriptions. Metadata Issues impact how search engines process your pages and display them in results. These issues may not be critical, but resolving them is often beneficial.
Missing Title
Title tags appear on the SERP as a preview of your page content and may encourage searchers to click if the title is relevant to their search. Title tag elements are used by search engines to identify keywords and associate the page with a topic.
To add or edit a title, open the page in question in your HTML editor. Then find the title tag. When you are done creating a new page title it should look something like this:
<p><title>Moz: Inbound Marketing and SEO Software, Made Easy</title></p>
Title Too Long
If your title tag is longer than 600 pixels, our tool will flag it as too long. Title tags appear on the SERP as a preview of your page content; they help searchers understand quickly if your page is relevant to their search.
Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of your title tag. This will also ensure that search engines don't automatically generate a title for your page, which may not provide the same incentive to click as a custom-written tag.
We have a title tag preview tool available in our SEO Learning Center which can help you test out how your updated title tags will look in search results before changing them on your site.
Title Too Short
If your title is less than 10 characters our tool will flag it as too short. Title tags appear on the SERP as a preview of your page content; they help searchers understand quickly if your page is relevant to their search.
Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of your title tag. Write title tags that use these characters efficiently to ensure that search engines don't automatically generate a title for your page, which may not provide the same incentive to click as a custom-written tag.
We have a title tag preview tool available in our SEO Learning Center which can help you test out how your updated title tags will look in search results before changing them on your site.
Multiple Titles
This means our crawler is finding more than one title tag on your page.
You can verify this by checking your source code for multiple sets of title tags identified with:
<p><title></p>
It is recommended that you remove the additional title tag as having multiple titles may confuse crawlers.
Missing Canonical Tag
The canonical tag should be located in the HTML head of your web pages. It tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of the intended URL and that all of the links and content metrics should actually be directed toward the provided URL.
We advise that each page have a canonical tag, even if it's self referring, just to prevent any possible duplicate content issues. That being said, implementing canonical tags for every page may not be part of your SEO strategy in which case you can ignore these issues in your Crawl Data so they won’t continue to flag them with each new crawl.
I have canonical tags but you’re still flagging my pages
If your pages have canonical tags but we’re still flagging them as missing canonical tags, it may be due to the way your canonicals are formatted. In order for our tool to detect your canonical tag, it must be formatted like a traditional canonical tag like this:
<p><link href=”https://moz.com/” rel=”canonical”></p>
If you’re using a different format than the one above, our tool may have trouble detecting it. For example:
<p><link rel=”canonical” content=”https://moz.com/”></p>
Missing Description
Meta descriptions provide the content or snippet that appears directly below the title tag on the SERP, and also appear on social media sites when your page URL is shared. These short paragraphs are the webmaster's opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they're looking for.
If your site uses only Open Graph (OG) elements for your descriptions, our crawler will be unable to parse them and will flag pages without HTML descriptions as Missing Description. Our crawler only recognizes traditional meta tags, i.e. meta name="description", as it is still considered best practices to have the traditional versions on your site.
The proper coding for a meta HTML tag is:
<p><meta name="description" content=”blahblahblah” /></p>
Description Too Long
If your meta description is more than 300 characters long, the tool will flag it as too long. The meta description provides the content that appears directly below the title tag on the SERP and encourages searchers to click. We recommend that your meta description be between 55 and 300 characters.
To fix these issues, reduce the length of your meta description to be less than 300 characters.
Description Too Short
If your description is less than 55 characters, the tool will flag it as too short. The meta description provides the content that appears directly below the title tag on the SERP and encourages searchers to click. We recommend that your meta description be between 55 and 300 characters.
To fix these issues, try updating your meta description to be at least 55 characters long.
URL Too Long
If your page URL is longer than 75 characters, our tool will flag it as too long. URLs describe a site or page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling, and accurate is one key to ranking well.
There are no easy fixes for this issue after the fact, especially if you are being linked to via the long URL. You can edit the URLs with your web development program. Make sure to use caution because it will cause broken links.
In the future, there are some good best practices to help you keep your URLs the right length. Make sure to keep it short. You don’t need to stuff it with keywords, but a few don’t hurt. Make sure your site structure doesn’t have too many folders because they can extend the title out longer than needed. Also, try to have static URLs, because dynamic URLs are not only an eyesore, but crawlers don’t like them.
Overly Dynamic URL
Your page URL contains too many parameters.
If a URL contains too many parameters, search engines may index the wrong version of the page or choose not to index the page at all. This will, in turn, hurt your rankings.
One of the best ways to stop that from happening is by adding a Disallow directive in your robots.txt file or adding a rel=canonical tag on each of the dynamical URLs.
Disallow: /*?dir=desc
Disallow: /*&order=
Tracking Issue Resolution Progress
As you work through issues flagged in your Campaign’s Site Crawl section you can track your progress by marking issues as fixed or by ignoring them.
Mark as fixed: Marking an issue as Fixed will indicate to our crawler that you have taken action on your site to resolve the issue. During the next crawl of your site, the issue will be removed from the interface if the crawler does not encounter the same issue again. If the issue is still found it will be marked as Not fixed in your Site Crawl data.
Ignore: Marking an issue as Ignore will indicate to our crawler that you are aware of the issue but are not planning to take action to resolve it. The crawler will not include the issue in upcoming crawls as a result. You can Unignore issues at any time from your Campaign Settings.
To mark issues as Fixed or Ignore, select them using the checkboxes on the left and then clicking Mark as fixed or Ignore from the top right.
For issues marked as Fixed, if our crawler does not encounter those issues in the next crawl they will be removed from your list of site crawl issues. If the issue is still found, it will be marked as Not fixed.
For issues marked as Ignore, our crawler will not report those issues in your next crawl. They will be removed from your list of site crawl issues. You can Unignore issues at any time.
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