Individual meta name="description" content="*" for pages and articles

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  chermsen · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 2:38 pm

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  In fact its not an idea but an urgend request concerning Google’s SEO starter (!) guidelines.
  http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

  Currently all pages and articles show a consistent meta-discription which contains the blogs subtitle.

  Example:
  <meta name=”description” content=”Christoph Hermsen, Lippstadt” />
  on this page
  http://g.hermsen.info/2013/03/18/seo-spickzetteln-google/

  Exception: rebloggs

  Solution:
  a field of 150 characters to type in the meta-description for each single article and page

  Compromise:
  first 150 characters of the content or
  same content as <meta property=”og:description” content=”*
  ” />

  The whole community will surely appreciate if this could be fixed as soon as possible.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  timethief · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 2:46 pm

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  This is a multiuser blogging platform. All blogs here wearing the same theme are using the same underlying template and we bloggers cannot access and edit metadata. However, that matters not as Google does not require any of that information at all and has not required it for years now.

  To verify blog ownership of a WordPress.com blog with the major search engines you must use this process > http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/ Note also that WordPress.com automatically supplies sitemaps http://en.support.wordpress.com/sitemaps/#xml-sitemaps-for-search-engines for our blogs to search engines – we do nothing.

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  chermsen · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 3:01 pm

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  with respect: –> page 7 of Google’s starter guide.

  “Use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about!”

  “Avoid: using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages”

  A unique meta-description had been HTML-standard even before Google started to crawl content.

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  timethief · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 3:08 pm

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  With respect over 35 million WordPress.com bloggers do not have access to metadata because this is a multiuser blogging platform and have no issues because Google does not require any metadata from WordPress.com bloggers.

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  timethief · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 3:09 pm

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  If you feel you need access to metadata you are free to hire a web host and set up your own independent WordPress.ORG install.

  WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

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  zodiac1978 · Member · Mar 25, 2013 at 3:16 pm

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  @devs:
  Meta Description should be set to the subtitle of the blog just on the homepage (per is_home conditional tag) and we shouldn’t use the meta tag description on other pages at all. Google will use then a snippet from the page which is more useful for people who search something an get single pages as a result.

  OR

  we get an extra field for it like chermsen is requesting. :)

  Best regards
  Torsten
  (Moderator German support forums)