Poll: Dynamic description meta tags?
No, they're pointless!
Yes, SEs dont pick the right description for me
Huh?
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Dynamic description meta tags for SEO Mod!
Pacifier
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Post: #1
Dynamic description meta tags for SEO Mod!

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone's interested in "Dynamic description meta tags" on each page. The description will be first 150 characters from the main post of a thread and will only be used for the "first" page of the thread to avoid duplication.

This isn't as easy as it sounds and it may not be available in the plugin and rather as a hard-coded modification. Vote in the poll and reply as needed. Smile

Thanks!

08-09-2006 03:01 PM
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pozmu
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Post: #2
RE: Dynamic description meta tags for SEO Mod!

You should remove this "feature", or at least provide an option to disable it.
Why? In Google, if you have meta description, it will be used instead the excerpt thus in search results! So when someone is searching for "xxx" keyword, he will see your description, that may not contain the keyword "xxx", and as result, he may decide not to click link to your page...

04-19-2008 01:51 PM
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Pacifier
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RE: Dynamic description meta tags for SEO Mod!

pozmu, that's not necessarily true. Google and other search engines take meta description merely as a suggestion. Setting these doesn't imply same description to appear in search results at every event. Search engines often display their own excerpts pulled from the page, usually, if the description meta tag doesn't have the desired keywords. Their algorithms are unknown but most of the time if they cannot find a better match for the keywords, they simply display the description from the meta tag.

Additionally, the pros of the dynamic description meta tags, more often than not, outweighs the cons. I will consider a way to disable it for the future versions though.

04-19-2008 05:08 PM
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pozmu
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RE: Dynamic description meta tags for SEO Mod!

Thx for answer. You're probably right, but I have read stories about webmasters, that had their pages listed on the first page of search results for desired keywords and received little traffic, due to meta description tags. Search engines algorithms may be good, but they are only algorithms, and automatic descriptions are, well, only automatic descriptions.
Anyway, it's not that difficult to disable it in current version - all you have to do is to comment these lines:

Code:
$description = seo_clean_description($row['message']);
            $meta_tag = "\r\n" . '<meta name="description" content="'. $description .'" />' . "\r\n";
            $page = preg_replace('#<meta(.+?) />#', "\\0{$meta_tag}", $page);

Thanks for the great plugin! It even works with my national characters Smile

04-19-2008 08:36 PM
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