(BUG?) Description meta tag shows irrelevant junk in English localisations in search

[DigitalElsterClipart]

Dear ETSY Community and developers. You seem to have a bug issue when filling the Description Meta tag in English.

Firstly to those who are not familiar with "What is that" - Description Meta tag is used by Google Crawlers to read the short information about your page and show it in Google Search output to the customers.

Description from Google: "A meta description tag generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for."

I did some experiments with my listings using Firefor browser and I can see that if I set ETSY language to German, the Description meta tag is actually filled with the information from Description field from the listing.

<meta name="description" content="Aquarell Kürbisse, Aquarell Halloween Aufkleber mit Kürbissen, Halloween geschmückter LKW, Halloween geschmückter Schuppen. Hochwertige digitale Halloween-Cliparts mit 300 DPI Auflösung, .....">

BUT when I set ETSY language to English (US) or English (UK) the Description meta tag in the same browser session shows:

<meta name="description" content="This Clip Art & Image Files item by DigitalElster has 43 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from United States. Listed on 01 Oct, 2023">

What is the impact? This means that Google indexes your page incorrectly leading to less sales coming from Search engines as, in this scenario, Search Engine takes into account only your Title and, maybe, keywords, completely ignoring the actually existing description that should actually be filled. You can see how many words were "scanned" for German search and how many for English.

I can send screenshots if you like/need.

For those who want to experiment in Firefox the steps are the following (at your own risk):

1. Open the Incognito session of your browser.
2. Open your listing.
3. Right-click anywhere on the screen, choose the "View page source" or "Explore" (the bottom option).
4. Go to Inspection tab, in the search field input the word "Description" (careful with auto-fill).
5. Go to the first detected occasion, check what is written there.
6. In the same UI change the output language and do the steps 4, 5

If you want to see the Google Search output:

• Open Incognito session
• go to Google.com
• In the search field type: site: your_shop_name.etsy.com your_search_name

for me this will be: site: digitalelster.etsy.com pumpkin clipart

Enjoy.

[CadaBayDesigns]

Hi and thank you for your post.

I have just checked mine in English and it is the same as yours. It is also giving the wrong information if you click on a listing too. Could have something to do with the drop in sales? Hope Etsy can fix this quickly.

[DigitalElsterClipart]

I do not know how ETSY gathers data for the search and how it analyses the pages, but if the Description meta tag is used during this analysis, then yes, this might be one of the reasons.

This will with 90% probability impact the Offsite ads and how the listings are "read" by Google Crawler robots.

[DigitalElsterClipart]

I would like to ask if anybody knows how to tag someone from ETSY team or close to ETSY team so I could find out if this is an issue or not....

[cindylouwho2]

"This means that Google indexes your page incorrectly leading to less sales coming from Search engines as, in this scenario, Search Engine takes into account only your Title and, maybe, keywords, completely ignoring the actually existing description that should actually be filled. You can see how many words were "scanned" for German search and how many for English." 

Google does not use the meta description as a ranking factor, and it won't affect indexing. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/meta-descriptions/ It is sometimes but not always shown in the SERPs, so the change could lead to issues with clickthrough rates from Google search, though. Also, Google reads the entire page, so they will see the real description too.  

Etsy used to automatically use the listing description as the meta-description, but so many sellers spammed them up that Etsy changed this practise years ago. They've  gone through several different automatic versions. 

The truth is, Etsy doesn't want individual listings ranking in Google search; they want their Market pages there. The company has done several things to sabotage the ranking possibility of Etsy listings for years now. This is intentional.