XF 2.1 My Meta Description

[potta85]

I made my site private for a bit to test something, to do so I changed my unregistered user permissions. Now I’m trying to get my meta description to register again on google. It still won’t. Might anyone know why that is?
Thanks

 

[djbaxter]

The meta description tag has little or nothing to do with organic Google search rankings. Indeed, you do not even need to have a meta description tag at all.

The only place it is sometimes used is as a snippet in the search results and even then Google can and often will use their own snippet if they think that yours does not describe your site well or is too spammy.

Finally, when did you make your site public? How long ago? Any time you make changes, especially with a newer site, it takes time for those changes to be reflected in Google search, anywhere from days to weeks or even months, depending on the popularity and amount of searches for a specific site.

You can set up a Google Search Console account for the site and submite the URL for a sitemap directly to them there. That will help to speed up re-crawling to pick up the changes.

 

[potta85]

Oh I didn’t realize that it took that long to register the changes. Well I say that it might be a permissions issue because I changed all the visitor permissions to never. So that any link to my site would automatically lead to the sign up page. And ever since then the snippet tag has been much smaller and less informative. I went back and readjusted my permissions though, so I’ll wait until the changes take effect.

My site went public months ago, back in June. I’ve been trying my absolute hardest to get it noticed ever since. I think I’m just not landing on the right traffic source yet. I’ve gotten some signups however.

 

[potta85]

Oh and I have google console setup, I actually just started using the xml sitemap generator today.

 

[djbaxter]

Oh I didn’t realize that it took that long to register the changes. Well I say that it might be a permissions issue because I changed all the visitor permissions to never. So that any link to my site would automatically lead to the sign up page. And ever since then the snippet tag has been much smaller and less informative. I went back and readjusted my permissions though, so I’ll wait until the changes take effect.

That would do it. Search engine spiders are unregistered guests so that means you gave Google (and Bing, etc.) nothing to index except your signup page.

 

[potta85]

Yeah that’s what I figured out too late, hahaha. I caught it though, so I changed it back now. But I didn’t realize it took awhile for the snippet to register. Now I’m really focused on site crawling, google trends keywords searches, and creating tags.