Missing Meta Description Example
I drove a boar's tusks through an oak and led him home without one word of explanation to anyone.
The short answer
- What it is
- A missing meta description means a page has no description meta tag in its head, or has one with empty content. The tag is optional in HTML.
- Why it matters
- The description is your chance to suggest the text under your result. Without it, the search engine picks the text, and that text may not win the click.
- How a crawler should report it
- Report a missing description when the on-page meta description is absent or empty. Also report a meta issue with a length of 0, and match the name attribute in any letter case.
- Live examples
/lab/missing-metas/(positive)/lab/missing-metas/near-miss/(near miss)
Who writes the search snippet when the page offers none
A missing meta description usually means nobody filled in the field. The CMS may not ask for one, or the template may not print it. Sites with thousands of products or posts often skip it because writing each one takes time. A plugin can also fail after an update, which removes descriptions from a whole section of the site at once. The page looks exactly the same to a visitor, so this fault can go unseen for a long time.
Browsers ignore the tag, since it is not shown on the page. Search engines use it as one possible source for the snippet in results. If it is missing, Google builds a snippet from the page text. That can work well for long articles. It can work poorly for pages where the first text is a menu or a cookie notice. Google has said for years that the description is not a ranking factor, but a good snippet can earn more clicks.
To detect it, parse the head of each page and look for a meta tag with the name description. HTML attribute names and this value are not case sensitive, so name="DESCRIPTION" is a real description and must not be flagged. Treat an empty content attribute as missing. Pages that are not indexable can be left out of the report, since they will not show in search anyway.
To fix it, write a short summary of the page in plain words. Say what the page offers and include the phrase people would search for. Start with your most important pages. For large sites, generate descriptions from structured data such as the product name, brand, and key features. Add the field to your CMS and make it easy to fill in. Then crawl again to confirm that the tags appear.