og:description taken from Site description, meta:description from Excerpt
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I set a front page on my site and found out that the og:description tag is taken from the “Site Description” instead of the page’s Excerpt.
This is problematic because social media sites use og:description for the short text in embed cards. See Facebook debugger examples below.
Compare my home page:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/?q=https://diegoe.beTo my about page:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/?q=https://diegoe.be/aboutThe Excerpt is always used for the og:description in pages and posts where it is set, otherwise the tag is filled with an auto-generated bit from the first few lines of your content.
However, in my homepage above, og:description is filled with the Site Description, even when the good old meta description is using the Excerpt.
I believe the correct behavior should be to always use the excerpt, no matter the role the page or post is filling.
So, in the above example, my home page’s og:description should be the same as the classic meta description tag.
It would seem that WordPress’ default behavior is to do exactly that, given the classic meta description tag is being set to the excerpt. og:description comes from Jetpack, IIRC.
See these source code bits for some more clarity:
For https://diegoe.be/:
<meta property="og:description" content="Diego Escalante Urrelo"> (...)<meta name="description" content="Enthusiast photographer and former Free Software hacker. I photograph people and places. I write about Perú, gear, and travel.">(og:description should read “Enthusiast photographer…” too)
For https://diegoe.be/about/:
<meta property="og:description" content="I’m Diego, communication consultant and former Free Software hacker. I work at Creative Block, my own creative consultancy company. Before starting my own company, I worked in technology and …">
<meta name="description" content="I'm Diego, communication consultant and former Free Software hacker. I work at Creative Block, my own creative consultancy company. Before starting my own company, I worked in technology and contributed to Free Software projects, specially GNOME, Debian, WebKit, and WordPress. I'm currently in a sabbatical from technology to pursue creative projects, like directing a news and comedy…">(Note how the two above are auto-generated excerpts from the post content, like you would see in archive post pages)
Hopefully all this is clear :-).
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hey @diegoe !
I think this is because so many sites’ front pages are actually a collection of several posts or pages, each with its own excerpt. So we use the page or post excerpt unless it’s the front page, where we default to the site description instead.
But I can see where you’re coming from in wanting to use the excerpt if the page is static. I’ll pass that feedback to the team. Cheers!
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Here’s the tricky part, too: changing it now could result in some trouble for folks who are used to that setting.
Or are you saying it was different before?
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Hi :D.
I think it makes sense in the case of “latest posts” as your front page, as you say it makes it more predictable to know what’s gonna be the site’s og:description.
For static front page cases I believe there’s a certain intent in that setting, and thus, a reasonable expectation of finer control.
As for fallout, I would say there’s not a big risk since you can’t “force” the excerpt to be used, meaning that you can’t work-around this behavior.
Those who are already using the Site Description as their og:description (knowingly or not) are unlikely to also have set an Excerpt field for the front page. Considering also that Excerpt is quite more “hidden” than Site Description.
So, if you make it so Excerpt takes precedence over Site Description for static front pages, only those who have set an Excerpt in addition to a Site Description would see a conflict. I don’t think this is a big group. For safety I guess the DB wizards could query and see if there’s many people on that situation.
Also, Site Description is usually taken by themes as a “short punch line” for your site’s name and presentation. For my site, using Orvis, this is how it would look:
Other themes go even further with very very big uses of Site Description.
I would say that given how visual Site Description is presented to the user as a setting, and how it’s visually used by most themes, it is expected to be a very short punch line and thus incompatible with a more meaningful and grammar friendly
<meta description>and og:description.Perhaps the *real* solution would be to create an explicitly “search engine description” somewhere? I don’t think themes and meaningful grammar friendly descriptions are ever going to meet in the middle.
By the by, I have another “why do you have so much free time” post here:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/wrong-criteria-when-selecting-ogimages-from-posts-without-a-featured-image?replies=1#post-2719602But never got around to poke anyone about it. Hint hint hint.
<3 <3 <3
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You’d like our new “Advanced SEO” offering. Right now it’s just in the business plan, but it does give much finer control over things like this.
Have you thought about posting this feedback at Github?
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I preferred to stop by the forums first since I haven’t tested this on dotorg, but I think with the insights from our chat it now can make a good issue on github.
For any passer by, here’s the relevant jetpack code which seems to be controlling this here on dotcom too:
I’ll move this to github :). Thank you!
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Thank you Diego! And we have this Github too for Calypso issues and feature requests.
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issuesSome of the discussion here might interest you:
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20seo%20
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