WP Blog Fix Needed: All-In-One SEO Google Descriptions Missing

Wed, 09 April 2008, 9:13 pm

HELP! I’ve decided to open up my blog development inadequacies with posts that help me get little annoyances on my WordPress blog fixed. I’m not a web developer and never will be one. I like to tinker with a lot of things and I get backed into corners that I don’t know how to get out of. Sure I can Google with the best of them, but there are times when you just want answers.

So, I’m going to make posts that spell out the issues I’m having, then link back to the post from development forums so that potential helpers (be it smart marketers, developers, garage-bound computer nerds, whomever) can get all of the detail they need. I’ll be happy to post the solution to the issue and give the fixer link adoration.

Today’s Problem: No descriptions beneath my page listings on Google.
I’m using the All in One SEO plugin on WordPress. Currently the All In One SEO plugin is version 1.4.6.7 (just upgraded from 1.4.2, would that fix it?), and the WordPress install is 2.2.2. I don’t understand why there are no Google descriptions as they do show up in the meta description of blog entries and even the static homepage of my site (View Source on them to see what I mean). Is it that there is something messed up with my code, some kind of plugin conflict, or perhaps Google is not creating a description for some other reason? I know Google doesn’t rely just on the meta description.

Blog Description Missing

Blog description missing on every post

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Read: 5 comments on “WP Blog Fix Needed: All-In-One SEO Google Descriptions Missing”

  • 1 uberdose 09 April 2008

    Your code looks fine. It looks like Google hasn’t really crawled your blog, there’s no cache in your search above and a site:www.krisrzepkowski.com search yields pretty much nothing. You seem to have a long history so it’s not a new blog. Did you recently change URLs or hosts? If not you need more links to your blog. Google shows none, yahoo shows about 29 but I haven’t checked how relevant they are for google.

  • 2 ziprz 09 April 2008

    Thanks for such quick feedback uberdose and for the code review. I think I shot myself in the foot with my desire for 2 divergent blogs from one WordPress install. I think by default, Google indexed krisrzepkowski.com/blog. What I really wanted was a workblog that was addressed at krisrzepkowski.com/blog/work and krisrzepkowski.com/blog/life all from one WordPress install using primary categories. Very early in my blog’s life I followed a tip to put this into my .htaccess file in my /blog directory

    # BEGIN WordPress

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /blog/
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

    # END WordPress

    this allowed prevented users from going to a blog page that would have to mix life and work and instead redirects to the root of my site, where I have a static home. I love how it works (for the most part) now, but I hate what’s going on with Google. I’m betting that it is getting confused by the rewrite sitting in /blog. Any ideas how I can make this situation any better? It’s still so strange too that this would have any effect on descriptions showing up.

  • 3 Jeff 10 April 2008

    The robots.txt in your site root disallows all bots.
    Have you considered the impact of robots.txt?

  • 4 ziprz 10 April 2008

    Jeff, you are a sage. I had totally forgotten that a year ago I put a robots.txt in there to keep my site incognito until I finished it. Of course I forgot to re-allow it. Now that I’ve allowed spidering will Google fix itself over time? Or is there anything else I should do to jumpstart that process? Thanks again!

  • 5 Jeff 10 April 2008

    Not telling Googlebot to ‘bugger off’ can only help I suppose. A Google sitemap file can help, especially when you want specific (read: weird) URLs crawled.

    Good luck!

React: with wreckless abandon


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This is my Life as a 37 year old husband and father of two and my Work as Executive Director of Marketing at Bennett International Group in Mconough, GA relocating from home in Rochester, NY.
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