Eleven pages on this site described themselves to Google in half a sentence

Here is what Google was told a page on this site is about:

Most small business websites are accurate for about six weeks. After that they start drifting. The prices are last year's. The hours are wrong over the.

It stops at the. The article itself says "the hours are wrong over the holidays," which is a finished thought. The description is that thought with the last word removed and a period put in its place, so it reads like a complete sentence right up until you reach the end of it. Eleven blog posts on this site carried a description shaped exactly like that.

What this tag is and where it actually shows up

The meta description is one line in the invisible part of a page. Google usually shows it under the blue link in search results, and it is the grey text that appears when someone pastes your link into WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack or a text message. It does not change your ranking. It changes whether the person who already found you decides you are worth the tap.

It is also used more times than most people expect. On this site the same string fills three separate tags on every page: description for search, og:description for social previews, and twitter:description. Fetching one of the broken pages and counting occurrences of the fragment returns three. Each post is also served in eleven languages, so a single bad line was being served thirty three times per post.

How a fragment gets written and nobody notices

Nobody sat down and typed a sentence that ends in "over the." The descriptions were generated from the top of each article: take the opening paragraph, cut it at about 155 characters, step back to the nearest word boundary so you do not end mid-word, and add a period.

That recipe reproduces the stored text exactly. The article's opening paragraph, cut at 155 characters, lands inside the word "holidays." Stepping back to the last space gives 151 characters ending in "the." Add the period and you have the 152 character string that was live.

The period is the whole problem. A truncation that ends in an ellipsis announces itself, and someone reviewing a list of descriptions would catch it in a second. A truncation that ends in a period looks finished. It passes a skim, it passes a glance at a spreadsheet of pages, and it keeps passing until somebody reads the last three words out loud.

Why the SEO checker said the page was fine

This site has a page-by-page SEO score, and it never flagged any of the eleven. That is not because the check is broken. It is because the check measures the only thing that is easy to measure.

The rule is a length band. Under 70 characters is too short, over 160 is too long, anything in between is reported as ideal. The broken description was 152 characters. It sat comfortably in the middle of the band and collected full marks, and so did the other ten.

This is worth sitting with, because every SEO tool works the same way: a length check, a keyword check, a check that the tag exists at all. None of those can tell you the sentence does not finish. Automated checks are good at absence and bad at nonsense, so a score of 100 means "nothing measurable is missing," not "a person read this."

The same check has a second problem in other languages

The length rule counts bytes, not letters. In English those are the same thing. In a language written outside the Latin alphabet they are not.

The Hebrew description on the reviews article is 128 characters long, which is a normal, well-sized description. Measured in bytes it is 226, well past the 160 the code treats as the maximum. An audit run against the Hebrew version of this site would report descriptions as too long when they are not, which is the mirror image of the first bug: one check waves through a sentence that is broken, the other complains about a sentence that is fine.

What it cost, honestly

Nobody can tell you how many clicks those eleven posts lost, and any number in this section would be invented. Google does not always use the description tag for the snippet, and there is no before-and-after to compare against.

What can be stated is what was served. Every request for those pages carried the fragment three times in the head of the document, in every language, for as long as the rows sat unedited. If Google chose to use the description, it printed a sentence that stopped in the middle. If somebody shared the link, the preview card did the same. That is the extent of the honest claim.

How to check your own site in about two minutes

Open a page on your site, right click, and choose View Page Source. Press Ctrl-F and search for name="description". You will land on a line that looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="...">

Read the text inside content out loud, all the way to the end. You are looking for four failures, in this order of frequency: it stops mid-thought, it is a slice of your opening paragraph rather than a description of the page, it is identical to the description on five other pages, or it is missing entirely. Do this on your home page, one service page and one article; three pages will usually tell you whether the pattern is site-wide.

If your site runs in more than one language, check one non-English page too. Descriptions are translated separately from body text on most systems, and a fix applied to the English row does not always reach the other ten.

How to write one that will not do this

Write it as a sentence about the page, not a slice of the page. The opening paragraph of an article is written to pull a reader into the next paragraph. A description is written for someone deciding whether to open the page at all. Those are different jobs, which is why cutting one into the other produces something that reads like neither.

A description that works usually does three things: it names what the page covers, it says what the reader will be able to do afterwards, and it finishes. Around 150 characters is a good target, but hit the end of a sentence before you hit the count, not after.

Ten of the eleven have been rewritten this way, each one a whole sentence describing what its article argues. When this was written on August 31, one still carried its fragment, because that post has ten translated copies of the same broken line and the fix has to reach all of them.

If you want the rest of the invisible half of a page, why your pages are not in Google yet covers what has to be true before a page can be shown at all, and how to write about your business covers the same problem in the visible copy: text that describes the page instead of being cut from it.