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
-
Google-selected canonical makes no sense
Howdy, fellow mozzers, We have added canonical URL to this page - https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/houston-tx/margot-schurig-8715369/share, pointing to https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/houston-tx/margot-schurig-8715369 When I check in Google search console, there are no issues reported with that page, and Google does say that it was able to properly read the canonical URL. Yet, it still chooses the page itself as canonical. This doesn't make sense to me. (Here is the link to the screenshot: https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/tt/MzU0Mjc0M18xMDY2MTc4Ng) Has anyone dealt with this type of issue, and were you able to resolve it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Two A Records or one CNAME and one A Record for www / naked domain?
What's the best way to point a domain to an IP address? Two A records one with host @ and the other with host www ? One A record pointing to the naked domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj613
One CNAME record with host www pointing to nakeddomain.com Something else? Thanks so much! This seems so basic, but always seems to stump me. I'm using WordPress, if it makes difference.0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Blocked from google
Hi, i used to get a lot of trafic from google but sudantly there was a problem with the website and it seams to be blocked. We are also in the middle of changing the root domain because we are making a new webpage, i have looked at the webmaster tools and corrected al the errors but the page is still not visible in google. I have also orderd a new crawl. Anyone have any trics? do i loose a lot when i move the domainname, or is this a good thing in this mater? The old one is smakenavitalia.no The new one is Marthecarrara.no Best regards Svein Økland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sveinokl0 -
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 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0 -
UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March
I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th. Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th. The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index. Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas? ** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.** Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0