Rank Math is messing up Meta Description

Hi Rank Math Staff,

wanted to say thanks for creating such a great plugin. I’m using it constantly on all my sites to improve my posts and pages in terms of SEO.

I recently encountered a problem with a lot of articles where the meta description that google used was not the same as defined in the General tab. This problem was really severe because sometimes google was using my footer as a description for my main site and other article descriptions consisted of a list of my sites’ menu (i.e Home – About Us – …).

This not only killed my CTR and overall SEO performance but also slowed down the indexing process cause google was not really understanding what the articles were about.

I browsed through the latest topics here on this support forum to see if others had smilar problems and indeed – a few people had the same issue. All solutions were the same and did not really solve the cause so I researched the issue a bit to understand where it’s coming from.

The analyzed html data of all these affected articles showed that there are different meta description values for the :og (social media) property and the usual description value. It looked like this:

<meta property=”og:description” content=”Right excerpt that contains the first 160 words of the article”>
…
<meta name=”description” content=”Another excerpt somewhere from the article that includes the keyword”>

From testing out a bit I realized that no matter what I put into the meta description field: (i.e %excerpt% or %seo_description%) the outcome will be the same. I think that this is confusing google because it now has different meta descriptions and is now it’s not happy about it.

RankMath had a neat update regarding this description feature. It is recommended to have the keyword in the first sentence so there has been some kind of auto-description functionality implemented that’s generating an excerpt by searching where the keyword turns up first in the article.

While this feature was quite handy it’s also messing up a few things that are not changeable.
In case I have a site that is named for example 10heavens.com but in the description I’d like to write something like “The best reviews for bible products….” the feature will override this meta description and put in what it finds first that’s named 10heavens.com …this would be the footer in this case with a remark to the copyright.

I have exactly these problems where my descriptions are being overriden by this feature and causing problems with google indexation and display. (Yes I tested the latest cached state in google and it’s 2 days old).

So could you please check into this issue and either deactivate this auto keyword-targeting description functionality in RankMath for the next update or tell us another way on how to solve the issue?