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.
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
-
Homepage not showing up for Brand/Any keywords (on Google) all of a sudden
The homepage to this website is crawled and indexed, however, it's not showing up for any searches, even brand searches (eg: Klay schools). This happened overnight. Do you know what the underlying issue could be? Link to the homepage: https://www.klayschools.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vishesh10104 -
H1 tags and keywords for subpages, is it best practice to reuse the keywords?
So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes. Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this: Shoes > Dress Shoes > Dress Shoe Cleaning Dress Shoe Repair Work Shoes > Work Shoe Cleaning Work Shoe Repair Play Shoes > Play Shoe Cleaning Play Shoe Repair Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords. Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Does it matter if the meta description and meta keywords come before the title tag in the
The way our site was built, engineers put the title tag blow the meta desc. and meta keywords. I asked to have it changed based on the best practice of putting the most important content first, but apparently doing this will cause a major ripple effect in the way the site was engineered. Will we lose out on full SEO benefit with this structure? Should I stand down? <title></p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Page titles, Keyword rich or single keyword?
Hi Everybody, My previous SEO company had set the page titles like : keyword | keyword | keyword | keyword | keyword | keyword | keyword | My new one is changing every thing and replacing them with sentences including one or two keywords in each one. Could you please let me know which one is better approach? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Issues with Google-Bot crawl vs. Roger-Bot
Greetings from a first time poster and SEO noob... I hope that this question makes sense... I have a small e-commerce site, I have had Roger-bot crawl the site and I have fixed all errors and warnings that Volusion will allow me to fix. Then I checked Webmaster Tools, HTML improvements section and the Google-bot sees different dupe. title tag issues that Roger-bot did not. so A few weeks back I changed the title tag for a product, and GWT says that I have duplicate title tags but there is only one live page for the product. GWT lists the dupe. title tags, but when I click on each they all lead to the same live page. I'm confused, what pages are these other title tags referring to? Does Google have more than one page for that product indexed due to me changing the title tag when the page had a different URL? Does this question make sense? 2) Is this issue a problem? 3) What can I do to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Google +one button - help needed
Can someone from this wonderful community answer the question. The link is http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-one-button-help-needed-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050