Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with 24-year experienced SEO professional Peter Mahoney

  • SEO Overhaul
  • SEO Campaign
  • WP Support
  • Blog
    • SEO Emails
  • Praise

Can the description show the Product Short Description

August 16, 2022 by Peter Mahoney

Hi Peter SEO Expert :),

Hope you’re doing well and having a good summer.

Had this message from a client – is that something you’ve set up? Is it something you control? And is it an okay idea to change as they’ve said?

“We have just noticed that the SEO plugin for our website is using the Additional time and date information for the description. Please can this be changed to pick up the Product Short Description instead.”

Didn’t want to screw up what’s your area of expertise!

Thanks

Thanks!

Having checked it all out I can confirm what I already knew – the SEO work is not sending additional date information.

In fact it’s sending this as the description:
“Working through this material will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between our organisation and our inspiration.”

That can be seen on line 15 of the page’s code (which you can see in most browsers by going to ‘add source’).

Ideally they’d send a screenshot of what they’re seeing and where that contradicts that.

My suspicion is they’re seeing it in Google. Which would likely be caused by the following:-

If Google thinks a description a website gives them doesn’t match the content of the page sufficiently they will often ignore that and pick their own description from the content of the page. And they suck at that – doing things like picking up date information rather than anything useful.

In this case the content in the description 100% matches text from the ‘Show more detail’ section. However by default that’s behind a click to expand the section (we developers know this as an accordion) which means it doesn’t really count towards SEO nearly as much.

My simplest recommendation would be to have that section expanded by default, so Google sees all that content on page load. It also means those product pages would be getting up to the 300 word mark more often and indexed much better than they are currently.

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), SEO Emails

Get FREE Wordpress SEO tips!

I send regular newsletters with WordPress SEO expert-level tips. Sign up to get them, along with my FREE e-book “Ongoing SEO Success”.

Did I mention they’re free!

Subscribe for free

Praise

I have over 2,500 5-star feedback reviews (and I’ve never received less than the full five.)

Here’s just one example, from Mike who runs Costello Entertainments:

Migration, Hosting, SEO and Speed Work on our new website all completed quickly and efficiently and Peter was most helpful in fixing an issue with a Popover on the site as well. If you’re thinking about asking Peter to do a job for you or hesitating, JUST DO IT! – He knows programming and the internet inside out, he’ll get the job done for you professionally, with a smile. I wish I could call a plumber or a tradesman to do the jobs I can’t do myself with the same level of confidence.
Read a lot more.

Recent Blogs

  • Thanks WordPress SEO expert for all your work.
    I feel like you are my guy for all my SEO. I did want to ask you if I need to get someone to write my Blog ...
  • Don’t just search for yourself!
    This is actually a stock answer I send people pretty often. I’m regularly asked about the difference ...
  • SEO doesn’t shouldn’t your site’s front-end
    On my SEO Emails section (where I share helpful responses to commonly asked queries) I recently shared a not ...
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed
    Right, this is an interesting one. It’s technical, but has a very simple main recommendation (in large ...

Legal

  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Disclaimer

Also read

  • Payment information

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog

Recent Posts

  • Thanks WordPress SEO expert for all your work.
  • Can the description show the Product Short Description
  • Don’t just search for yourself!
  • SEO doesn’t shouldn’t your site’s front-end
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed

© Copyright 2023 Wordpress SEO Expert · All Rights Reserved · Site by Peter Mahoney