Google not showing my meta description

[lhout69]

Hi there, whenever you search my website on Google, it will show my title, but the description is set to show the testimonials I have. Why is it doing that?

[Jamie-Ryan]

Hey!

It's likely that this is happening for one of two reasons:

1. You haven't specified the description (Sales Channels > Online Store > Preferences).
2. Or if you've already done this, your site hasn't been crawled by Google since this has been set (resulting in Google is filling it with copy from the page). In this case, it can take time for the change to appear but you can sometimes speed up the process by submitting an updated sitemap to Google using Google Search Console (Index > Sitemaps).

Hope this helps!

[cmorales]

If you don't mind, could you send the link of your website?

[DeepakIqlect]

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@lhout69 wrote:

Hi there, whenever you search my website on Google, it will show my title, but the description is set to show the testimonials I have. Why is it doing that?

---

There can be many reasons for that - 

- If your website is not being crawled since you have added the description then it won't appear in SERPs

- Description is not relevant to the page then Google's algorithms might omit that and choose something from the page

- Sometimes Google simply don't consider Meta description and show a meta description from the page's content which algorithms think more effective. There is no way to tell google to use the provided meta description but you can always optimize the text to match the expectations.

[lwilliams1221]

I'm having this same problem and it is only of concern because Google is not picking up the meta descriptions in SERPs. A site audit shows ALL of our descriptions are missing even though they are clearly typed into the Shopify SEO area. If anyone has any ideas, we would surely appreciate it. The website is bengarelick.com and we rank for many keywords so you could try "large diamond rings" or "purple amethyst engagement rings" to see that Google is picking up the first few words of the product/page description rather than the SEO meta description that has been entered. Thanks, in advance, for any help! 🙂

[Niki_K]

Hi,

apparently, this is because of Google ignoring your meta descriptions - the algorithm has decided to use a snippet from your page which suits better to the search term. Read more on these trustworthy sources: 

https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

https://yoast.com/help/my-meta-descriptions-arent-showing-up-in-the-search-result-pages/

You can also try to request recrawling of your pages if you use Google Search Console, or/and read some tips for writing the right meta descriptions - https://yoast.com/meta-descriptions/. I think that you've probably done it, just sending since I think this is a great source to read. 

Hope it helped!

[bmac]

I appreciate the response. I'm familiar with what was said in those articles.
It doesn't really explain why for 3-4 years the meta descriptions were ok and then suddenly overnight all 100+ products stopped showing and haven't shown for 2 months since that single moment. I'm going to follow up with shopify support. Any more ideas would be welcome.

Thanks again

[sophiawils59]

This could happen due to the following reason

1. Your website is not being crawled since you have added the meta description on it.

2. It may be possible that the meta description you have added does not relevant to the page and in such case, Google will choose the description from the page's content which algorithm think more effective for your website.

[lwilliams1221]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I did read the advice in the earlier thread and these items are not a factor for us. Any OTHER ideas would be super helpful

[bmac]

Those solutions dont apply to my site. Ive been with shopify for 4 years and have never had a problem with meta descriptions until a mopnth or two back I noticed all of my meta descriptions are being ignored by google and being replaced with my actual description.
So just confirming this is an issue with no fix.