Should you give all the posts in a Forum an unique description? Or let it empty so Google can make one with the crawled keywords .... ...
-
To make all descriptions for all forum posts unique is a hell of a job....
One option is to crawl the first 165 characters and turn these automaticly into the meta description of the page.
If Google thinks the meta description is not suitable for the search query, Google will make a own description.In this case all te meta descriptions are unique, like the Google Guidlines want you to do.
How will Google think off the fact when we delete the meta description tag so Google will make all the descriptions by herself?
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your complete view on this topic.
You're right, it is not a crawling thing but dus adding a PHP line into the template
Cheers,
Wesley Kelder
-
Thanks for your confirmation!
-
If you are going to create a description then as Todd says, use the first 150-160 characters (note characters - not words). However, you shouldn't need to crawl the site to do that, they should be generated automatically as part of your page template.
I presume your forum generates pages from content in a database. If that is the case (it almost always is) then you just need to adjust the template and the descriptions will automatically appear when the page is output. A simple job for whoever looks after development for you. If you use a common forum platform there is almost certainly as "seo" plugin that handles this for you.
For forum category pages you can probably write these manually. This is where they are probably more likely to do good as well. Personally I would focus on those and not worry too much about adding a meta-description to the thread pages. If you don't mind tools like GWMT and MOZ flagging up the fact that they are missing, their absence is going to have very little impact compared with taking a snippet from the body text.
I know that some people will scream in shock at the thought of not having a meta-desc. I do though notice that even Moz.com don't bother on thread pages (like this one)
-
I would recommend doing just what you suggested - utilize the first 152.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Google understand misspellings in terms of what keywords I should optimize a page for
Hey there! This is sort of an oddball question. We do a lot of hospital websites. One client that we have spells "Orthopedics" as "Orthopaedics" which is another spelling. When I did initial keyword research the volume for Orthopedics as I expected is much higher. However when I do a test search for "Orthopaedics" it looks like I'm getting the same results and Google is highlighting in the content "orthopaedics" even though my search query was "orthopedics". What I'm wondering - is it the same thing to optimize for "orthopaedics" or is it a recommendation I should make to the client to change to "orthopedics" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CentreTEK0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Am I turning a non geo-keyword into a geographic one?
Our client has a high powered site with tons of authority. They dominate in the eastern united states for multiple keyterms that relate to their service based company. However their closest competitor, a site with literally HALF of their authority, ranks ahead of them all over the world in markets outside of NYC. The client is using the terms "NYC and New York" all over their site, is it possible that they are giving themselves a local limitation by doing so when their competitors dont? The keyword itself doesn't necessarily lend itself to a local geo-based search result, but are we artificially CREATING that situation ourselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fueled0 -
Novice Question - Can Browsers realistically distinguish words within concatenated strings e.g. text55fun or should one use text-55-fun? What about foreign languages especially more obscure ones like Finnish which Google Translate often miss-translates?
I am attempting to understand what is realistically possible within Google, Yahoo and Bing as they search websites for KeyWords. Technically my understanding is that they should be able to distinguish common words within concatenated strings, although there can be confusion between word boundaries when ambiguity is involved. So in the simple example of text55fun, do search engines actually distinguish text, 55 and fun separately? There are practical processing, databased and algorithm limitations that might turn a technically possible solution into a unrealistic one at a commercial scale. What about more ambiguous strings like stringsstrummingstrongly would that be parsed as string s strummings trongly or strings strummings trongly or strings strumming strongly? Does one need to use dashes or underscores to make it unambiguous to the search engine? My guess is that the engine would recognize the dash or space and better understand the word boundaries yet ignore the dash or underscore from an overall concatenated string perspective. Thanks in advance to whoever can provide any insight to an old coder who is new to this field.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ny600 -
Google drop down - keyword gone, why?
Hi guys, i received traffic off a yearly based term, this year for '2013' i noticed it is nowhere near what the yearly term was for the year before. I believe that Google has stopped the yearly term appearing in a drop-down menu from a big volume related term, my question is how do they determine what goes in the drop down menu for related/relevant searches?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Keyword search filter in Google Adwords: broad? exact? phrase?
Hello all I am working in my website and analysing the potential best keywords for the SEO (post/page name and url path name). 1. I am using Google Adwords. Any other tool you would recommend? 2. Which selection should I make in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool in order to know the monthly global searches of the keywords I should target? Exact? Phrase? Broad? For instance, KEYWORD SEARCH:"Information about Madrid" BROAD MATCH: 300,000 EXACT MATCH: 1,500 Te potential of the keyword is 300,000? 300,000 searches are undertaken on a month that contains that sentence and its variations? Or the relevant keyword potential is the exacta match traffic? Thank you very much! Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
Infographic: How do I make one out of this outline?
Hello, I'm making an important infographic for nlpca(dot)com on "What is NLP?" The content is going to come from this page, the creator of which is a close friend of ours: http://www.nlpu.com/NewDesign/NLPU_WhatIsNLP.html I've attached an outline of the content. My concern is that this is not a collection of statistics, but it is a very complex definition. So it's not a true infographic, but "What is NLP" is the most searched for content in our industry (and the nlpu.com link above is the strongest ranking page for that term). I'm wanting help in getting direction on how to create a stellar graphic out of this, so we can get stellar targeted content and gain a group of backlinks from the project. Any suggestions, large or small, are very welcome, and feel free to reference other infographics which can be good models. Thank you so much. for-seomoz-1-4-12.gif
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0