Meta Descriptions messed up in SERPs lately?

[SEOHermit]

Using Wordpress. We have been noticing a problem with some of our recent posts having partial meta descriptions from other posts showing in the SERPs. These are unrelated posts and we thought we had tied it to the fact we had category archives indexed and it was using the most recent post content in the meta for other posts. In addition, we had a side bar containing a small portion of the content of our recent new post adds as a summary on the single pages of our posts. We were unsure which of these were causing the problem. So we removed both. This morning, we discovered, we are not the only people experiencing the issue. In fact, we saw another instance of a large company posting about petroleum with a mixed meta talking about oil and it had a blurb about health insurance at the end. Is this something of a remnant of a recent algo change, or is this indeed something we did wrong...and coincidentally, they did wrong as well?

 

[SunnyLeon]

Maybe a conflict of plugins? It must be something on your side, can't see Google messing up like this... Never heard of a crawler saving a bad version of meta description with a mix of posts..

 

[SEOHermit]

Maybe a conflict of plugins? It must be something on your side, can't see Google messing up like this... Never heard of a crawler saving a bad version of meta description with a mix of posts..

Excellent thought - thank you very much - looking into this...

 

[Brijendra Sial]

Yeah should be plugin conflict, You should use yoast seo. Its best out there.

 

[tiiberius]

Might be mentioned plugin conflict.

It can also be messed up canonicals.

Or really something on their end. They are playing with snippets for sure these days.

 

[SEOHermit]

Might be mentioned plugin conflict.

It can also be messed up canonicals.

Or really something on their end. They are playing with snippets for sure these days.

Canonicals - also a good point - will be looking at this as well. Thank you! And we have seen snippet activity rampant for sure. Thank you!

 

[SEOHermit]

Yeah should be plugin conflict, You should use yoast seo. Its best out there.

Checking the plugins. We have several sites and have a mix of those on Yoast and others on RankMath. We have Yoast Premium on those with Yoast. Why do you like this over RankMath or other options? Thank you for the help!