Meta descriptions gone

  • Resolved wouterdoorn

    (@wouterdoorn)


    3 years, 4 months ago

    Hi,

    I just migrated our website to a new server and just disccovered that all our handwritten meta descriptions are gone and replaced by generated descriptions. Is it possible to revert them? Are the descriptions stored in a database (I have backups)?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    3 years, 4 months ago

    Hi Wouter,

    Sorry for keeping you waiting; holidays followed by a fever don’t make great timing.

    TSF stores all custom descriptions in the default WordPress post and term databases. For posts, the key is _genesis_description (learn more). For terms, the key is autodescription-term-settings (containing a serialized sub-key description) (learn more).

    If you can extract that data from your backups, you should be able to recover it. It should be straightforward when none of your posts and terms have changed their IDs.

    Thread Starter wouterdoorn

    (@wouterdoorn)

    3 years, 4 months ago

    hope you’re feeling better!

    Thanks for the info, that will probably help. I am actually considering just letting TSF generate the meta desciptions. Google generates it’s own most of the time anyway and I am not convinced that it’s beneficial to SEO to write my own (maybe it has a small effect on CTR)…

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by wouterdoorn.
    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    3 years, 4 months ago

    Thank you!

    And that is true — still, you can (dis)prove this by applying custom descriptions to several pages and see if those attract more visitors. Either way, Google states that meta descriptions do not (directly) contribute to ranking, “[Meta descriptions are] not used for ranking though”: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1291462241104138247.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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