Problem with WPBakery – Meta Descriptions?

#20574
  • Resolved BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    I have already investigated this issue with the Salient theme support and they don’t believe it is an issue with their theme, so I wanted to check with you guys since I believe it is RankMath that generates the meta description tags?

    Problem is, my client recently noticed their meta description changed to a bunch of WPBakery shortcodes + we noticed RankMath was missing from the list of installed plugins when we first noticed this.

    Upon investigating I tried to reinstall RankMath, it allowed me to try this, but then said the folder already existed – which was weird as it didn’t show up as an inactive plugin or anything.

    So I went ahead and deleted the folder for the plugin and reinstalled it – that worked, but it didn’t fix the meta description on the home page, even though I resaved the page.

    We have not overridden the header.php file within our child theme so have no idea why the meta description is set to a bunch of WPBakery shortcodes?

    Login for WP admin is included in the private information.

    Thanks!

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • Michael Davis

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math today.

    Rank Math will auto generate the meta description from the post content when you have set the variable to %excerpt% and in this case the post content is made up of WPBakery shortcodes.
    I have gone ahead and entered a manual meta description via the Rank Math metabox > Edit snippet option to prevent the auto generation of the description.

    Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.

    ​​​​​​

    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Thanks Michael.

    That’s weird as I checked the snippet and it seemed like it already had one set on the homepage, which is why it confused me on why it wasn’t working.

    For example, check the “about” page – it currently has WPBakery shortcodes showing in the meta description in the page source, but when you check the snippet it appears to have something entered already?

    Thanks!

    Michael Davis

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hi There,

    Thanks for the follow-up. The content you see on the description editor is loaded as a placeholder and it’s auto-generated from the site’s excerpt.

    I also edited the same on the about page and it’s now loading as expected.

    Do check it out and let me know how it goes.

    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Oh ok thanks.

    It’s a little hard to tell to be honest that that is placeholder text, it doesn’t seem light enough (or obvious enough as it seems like a real entry). Another suggestion than changing the font colour is making it more obvious somehow that the field is indeed actually empty.

    With the text in the field and the preview shown everything looks all fine and dandy and it’s not obvious you need to do anything.

    Lastly, perhaps you should automatically strip out (or provide the option) shortcodes from auto-generated meta descriptions to avoid problems such as these; the shortcodes seem to have been stripped out for the placeholders, but not in the actual page meta descriptions.

    Michael Davis

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hello,

    Thanks for getting back to me.

    I’m glad to have been able to help, I’m going to pass the feedback to the developer for further consideration.

    Feel free to reach out to me in case something else comes up 🙂

    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Great, thanks!

    Michael Davis

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hello,

    You are most welcome and If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.

    If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/?rate=5#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.

    If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.

    Thank you.

    Michael Davis

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hello,

    You are most welcome and If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.

    If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/?rate=5#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.

    If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.

    Thank you.

    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    I just noticed a major problem with this – installing RankMath on another site that uses WPBakery and going through the settings; to avoid this issue I tried to set the Description within the “Titles and Meta” settings to a blank value, so the client could then just set the description to whatever they wanted on each page and if they didn’t want a meta description for a particular page then at least it wouldn’t end up with a bunch of WPBakery shortcodes.

    Problem is, if I set it to a blank value then it reverts back to the default of “%excerpt%” – meaning the only way to avoid getting a bunch of WPBakery shortcodes is to set it to something else other than blank OR you you’re going to be forced to input a meta description for every page – imagine if a site had hundreds of pages or more.

    This seems like quite a big problem.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by BLMMedia.
    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Ok, I just noticed you can use %excerpt_only% to avoid auto-generation thankfully. But alas, I still think this particular issue needs some more thought put into it.

    Pratik

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Hello,

    To show the auto-generated shortcode content in meta description, please use below filter code:https://rankmath.com/kb/filters-hooks-api-developer/#allow-shortcodes

    Please note, if shortcode contains HTML tags like form, headings, etc then it could break the layout. Please use this filter with caution.

    I hope that helps. Thank you.

    BLMMedia

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi @pratick …. thanks for the response.

    I have no need to want to use shortcodes in the description, just didn’t want them creating a mess in there, that’s why I suggested they automatically get stripped (or you should at least be given this option).

    Since using %excerpt% is the default option with auto-generation I think many people could get caught out and end up with meta descriptions with a bunch of shortcodes in them from any number of the page builders out there, or even shortcodes from other things.

    Todd

    4 years, 4 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi,

    Thanks for the suggestion. We will see what we can do about that.

    In the meantime, the best solution is to add a meta description manually to posts where shortcodes are showing up in the automatically generated meta description.

    You can do that like this:
    null

    Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

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