# Quiet SEO Leaks: Empty Pages, Missing Descriptions, Cut-Off Titles

> Small search problems that never show as errors: empty category pages in Google, brand pages with no description and titles cut off in results.

Canonical: https://thegrowthproject.com/blog/quiet-seo-leaks/

## Results

- **1 in 9** brand pages had no meta description
- **19** blog titles cut off in search results
- **~12×** sales from free Google search, July to October
- **19 → 669** keywords the site ranks for, January to September

_One ecommerce store. The growth figures also reflect new product ranges, more product content and the season, not these fixes alone._

**Field note from an ecommerce store.** Nothing was broken. Rankings were steady, and the SEO plugin showed green ticks. A page-by-page audit against live data still turned up a list of small leaks.

## What we saw

- **Empty category pages were in Google.** Categories with no products anywhere beneath them were indexable, so people could land on a page with nothing to buy.
- **Some brand pages had no meta description at all.** Google wrote its own snippet from whatever text it found first.
- **A custom title on the main shop page was being ignored** because of how the store rewrites that URL, so the default title showed instead.
- **Blog titles ran well past 60 characters** once the site name was added, and were cut off in results.
- **One product had been copied and kept another product's title and description**, so two different pages competed for the same search.
- **Checkout, cart and account pages were indexable**, which is thin content Google has no reason to show.

## What we did

- Set empty categories to be excluded from search automatically, so the rule keeps working as the catalogue changes.
- Added a fallback description for any category or brand without one.
- Fixed the shop-page title override, shortened the long titles and rewrote the duplicated product.
- Excluded transactional pages from search.

## Why it matters

None of these would show up as an error, and most SEO tools score them as minor. Together they decide whether Google shows your best page or a weak one, and whether the result is worth clicking. Finding them takes your real data, which is how our [SEO audit](/growth/seo-audit/) works.