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 & AI Search (GEO) Expert