Unfamiliar Meta Description Tags

[medtouch]

I'm working with a client who uses a CMS which loads meta tags into their site through its backend. On-page I see this in the source:

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Any luck with this? What CMS are you using? Most CMS's allow editing of this sort of thing. If not, as others have suggested you could see if the descriptions show up in something like Screaming Frog or even just a simple header checker like http://urivalet.com/

[Linda-Vassily]

When you say you see that on-page, do you mean when you look at the source inside the CMS, or on the actual webpage?

If it is the CMS, I agree, don't worry about it. When I first started with the CMS I am using now, I got very upset when I saw image links that looked like this: src="~/media/46166ADB93F248DDB7AF5C6CC8BD479C.ashx

I wanted easy-to-read links with appropriate keywords!

After wasting most of a day working on "fixing" them, I found out that once you get to the actual live webpage, everything looked fine. So I had to spend the better part of another day changing them back. [That is what you get for messing with objects.]

[medtouch]

Mike, the added id=ctl08_hm content is appended by the CMS it seems. It's not a choice made by the client or myself

[Mike.Bean]

Hello,

You should still be able to access the page to figure out the meta description that has been officially entered. Also, was that an example? Why would your meta description be id=ctl08_hm?

Thanks,

- Mike

[hectormainar]

As far as you also include the name="description" and its value in the "content" attribute, having an ID on a Meta Tag won't probably avoid it from being correctly read by Google althought it is not W3C compliant. According to HTML specification, the meta element cannot have that ID attribute: The only valid attributes for meta tags are:

• name = name [CS]
      This attribute identifies a property name. This specification does not list legal values for this attribute.
• content = cdata [CS]
      This attribute specifies a property's value. This specification does not list legal values for this attribute.
• scheme = cdata [CS]
      This attribute names a scheme to be used to interpret the property's value (see the section on profiles for details).
• http-equiv = name [CI]
      This attribute may be used in place of the name attribute. HTTP servers use this attribute to gather information for HTTP response message headers.

Also, you can include:
    lang (language information), dir (text direction)

Do you know why do you include that ID and how to remove it if it has no use?

[RyanPurkey]

It looks like the added portion is going to prevent recognition for the overall meta description tag. Is this a custom tag being used to identify products / pages internally to the CMS? For meta description, you'll want to use the syntax:

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would search the page in Google and see if the meta description is reflection. I would also make sure that ScreamingFrog is seeing those as well.

I have had clients that used this and it worked, so I wouldn't be too concerned. But I would definitely search and see if it appears. If it doesn't, I would go with the standard method of implementation.

Hope this helps! Good luck!