Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Auto generated meta description tag in Drupal
-
Was having issues on Drupal not autogenerating a meta description tag, but I think I have figured it out. Just to verify, would this piece of code be the meta description tag (reason I ask is b/c it looks a little different than the usual tag I have seen):
-
Thanks this is really helpful. What tweaked me on this was the weekly SEO Moz crawls of my campaigns that were reporting back "missing meta description" with a giant red "error" button.
-
I completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one
-
It's really not necessary to auto generate a meta description. They have zero SEO value.
The only thing they are used for is the text that shows up in the search results. If you don't have a meta description set, Google will just pull the text from your site that it thinks it is most relevant. If you want to override that with a custom description, that's fine and can increase CTR, but this is something you would want to do manually, not auto generate it.
-
Gah. Thanks. Really having trouble getting Drupal to auto-generate a description meta tag based on a summary of the page (or at least the first lead sentence). This fix is for a high output, multi author blog. Any suggestions?
-
The meta description tag looks like this:
<meta < span="">name="description" content="The Description"></meta <>
The code that you posted is an Open Graph description tag, which is used by Facebook to determine what description to show when your content is shared on Facebook.
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
-
Meta Description for ALL my Posts is Being Overwritten!
Every single one of my posts meta descriptions are being overritten with the same meta description! I use Yoast and have proper meta descriptions in my posts, but something seems to be overriding them. https://ibb.co/rcgWNXb Any idea what could be causing this? Thank you!!! Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety1 -
Deleting Tags Properly - Advice Needed
I have over 18,000 tags. Needless to say, most of them are relatively useless to the user and generate no traffic, while cluttering the site. (I use Wordpress.) My plan is to delete tags, but I want to do so safely as to not accumulate website errors. (Tags pages are noindexed.) What process should I take here? Here was my basic plan (any help is appreciated). 1. Find irrelevant tags that are connected with hardly any posts. 2. Go into the post, and remove said tag. 3. Now, with a tag having a 'count' of 0, I go into Tags, and delete it. Safe, right? But now it seems those tag pages just turned into 404s "Uh-oh...Page not found!" Where do I go from here? Create 410's? Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Do Canonical Tags Pass Link Juice?
I have an ecommerce website where some pages link to a product page with a different URL. EXAMPLE: 1: /category/product1.html (not indexed by Google) with canonical pointing to product1.html Other page link to the product like below. 2: product1.html (indexed by Google) Now the question is, does 1: pass any link juice to product1.html or not? Is it worth to change everything and link only to one URL? My site is running on Magento!
Technical SEO | | bill3690 -
Hreflang tags with link to redirect loop
Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel
Technical SEO | | DanielKiely60 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Generating a signature and expires in java
Hello, I am developing a tool for my company to get stats from SeoMoz using your API. During development, I have been using the example signature and expires values which are auto-generated for me. Now that testing is complete, my code will need to generate these values. I have been googling looking for a resource demonstrating how to do this using Java, but I have not found a good example. I was hoping that someone at SeoMoz would have a resource or an example that they could share. The email associated with this account belongs to a non-developer, so if a response is provided via email in addition to the forum, sending it to my email would be much appreciated. Thank you, Anthony aruffino@ignitemedia.com
Technical SEO | | TRich500 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1