Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with your meta description not being used as expected. It seems like you’ve already taken several steps to troubleshoot this, which is great.
In Rank Math, if the custom meta description you set is not being used, it could be due to a few reasons:
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Focus Keyword: Ensure that your focus keyword is included in the meta description. Rank Math checks for this and may revert to using the first few lines of the post if it doesn’t find the keyword in the description.
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Description Template: Check your settings under Rank Math > Titles & Meta to ensure that the description template is not set to something that overrides your custom meta description. You should be using %seo_description% for posts, which you mentioned, but double-check that there are no conflicting settings.
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Post Excerpt: If you have not set a custom excerpt for your post, Rank Math may default to using the first paragraph of your content. Make sure to set a post excerpt if you want to control what is displayed when no meta description is found.
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Caching Issues: Since you’ve already cleared your cache, ensure that there are no server-side caching mechanisms (like Varnish or CDN caching) that might be serving an older version of your page.
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Theme or Plugin Conflicts: Sometimes, themes or other plugins can interfere with how meta descriptions are handled. Try temporarily switching to a default theme (like Twenty Twenty-One) and disabling other plugins to see if that resolves the issue.
If you’ve checked all these points and the issue persists, we recommend replying to your ticket with this information, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further. Please include your site URL in your reply for more accurate assistance.
Thank you for raising this concern, and we hope to resolve it for you soon!
This is an automated reply from Rank Math Support Bot. Your ticket has been assigned to a human agent and we will get back to you shortly.
Hello,
Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.
If the meta description you wrote is showing just fine in the page source, then Rank Math is correctly generating the description. The settings are correct.
Can you please explain further what you meant by “not being used”? If you are referring to Google not using your meta description, please note that it is a pretty common thing with Google these days. It happens with 70% of the results that even if everything’s fine, Google decides to show a different meta information for your search keyword, there is nothing you can do as Google sometimes ignores the custom meta info altogether and show something from the page’s content that matches the search intent better.
To understand more about this, please check this article:Â https://rankmath.com/kb/different-meta-title-and-description/
Looking forward to helping you with this one.
Hello,
I mean that my written SEO snippet is not even being used as the example given by RankMath in the ‘Titles & Meta – Post’ settings when using ‘%seo_description%’. It still show the first few lines of the post itself.
I understand that google might not use it but the fact that Rankmath itself isn’t using it suggests to me something is stopping it being used at all.
Hello,
Thanks for the clarification.
The preview you’re seeing in Titles & Meta → Posts is only an example. It does not pull in your actual SEO description for every post, nor does it affect what Rank Math outputs on the front end.
That sample text is simply taken from the latest post in your Posts list to illustrate how the format would look. As long as your custom meta description appears correctly in the page source, Rank Math is using it as intended.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any other questions.
