[add] Page specific meta descriptions, the easy way #2964
Conversation
nternetinspired
changed the title
|
👍 |
|
Cool. In the future, I'd like to know what best practices are and what make for the best websites, not what some visionary has to say about it. I can intuit that based on the change, but let's leave Matt Cutts out of pull requests and use published standards from places like Google. Thanks! |
|
Thanks for merging :) I'm a little confused though about your reference to Matt Cutts. As the engineer in charge of search quality at Google I think he's pretty well placed to provide good answers in this respect and published standards in this vein at Google are typically posted by him. The official Google detail on meta descriptions is currently found on this page, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624, which as you'll notice also contains a video from Matt Cutts describing how Google creates snippets for listings and referring repeatedly to meta descriptions. |
| @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ | |||
| <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> | |||
|
|
|||
| <title>{% if page.title %}{{ page.title }}{% else %}{{ site.title }}{% endif %}</title> | |||
| <meta name="description" content="{{ site.description }}"> | |||
| <meta name="description" content="{% if page.excerpt %}{{ page.excerpt | strip_html | truncate: 160 }}{% else %}{{ site.description }}{% endif %}" /> | |||
There was a problem hiding this comment.
The end tag here wasn't needed BTW.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I would also add strip_newlines after strip_html since I end up with a newline here.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
What do you mean “The end tag here wasn't needed?”
There was a problem hiding this comment.
/> -> >. I already made the changes in #2982.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Good catch @XhmikosR Thanks.
|
Ah, I totally overlooked this. Good idea! Thank you. |
Rather than have duplicate page descriptions across all pages of the site it's beneficial to have page-specific meta descriptions.
Background
Matt Cutts says duplicate meta descriptions are not cool:
http://youtu.be/W4gr88oHb-k
Proposed solution
We could set a unique description in each post front-matter and use that, but for the sake of laziness and ease-of-use it's far easier to grab the excerpt and use that instead. If there isn't one, fall back to the site description.
Testing
Check that the post 0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll now has it's own meta description, whilst the homepage uses the site.description